


Call All You Want

by eva_roisin



Series: Widows and Orphans [4]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angel/Human Relationships, Awkward Angels (Supernatural), Castiel and Dean Winchester and Sam Winchester are Jack Kline's Parents, Castiel and Dean Winchester in Love, Dean Winchester's Taste in Music, Domestic Castiel/Dean Winchester, Established Castiel/Dean Winchester, Fixing Heaven (Supernatural), Grieving Sam Winchester, Heaven has conflict, Jack Kline & Sam Winchester Friendship, Jack Kline Needs A Hug, Jack Kline as God, M/M, Minor Eileen Leahy/Sam Winchester, POV Jack Kline, Post-Episode: s15e20 Carry On, Protective Jack Kline, Sam Winchester Knows, Team Free Will 2.0 (Supernatural), Winchester Family Angst (Supernatural)
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-01-30
Updated: 2021-03-06
Packaged: 2021-03-16 16:21:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 29,076
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29085300
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eva_roisin/pseuds/eva_roisin
Summary: The story continues: Jack attempts to be a better God while finding his own place in existence; Dean and Cas fall more deeply in love than they ever thought possible; Sam raises his son as he struggles to let go of the past.
Relationships: Castiel/Dean Winchester, Gabriel/Jack Kline
Series: Widows and Orphans [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2025251
Comments: 8
Kudos: 20





	1. Chapter 1

_Tengo que morir cantando_ _  
Ya que llorando nací,  
Que las penas de este mundo  
No todas son para mi._

Back when they lived together on earth, Cas told Jack that his favorite song was “Telephone” by Lady Gaga and Beyoncé. He said he loved it because it was up-tempo, fun, and danceable. He played it all the time while driving his truck.

When Jack listened to the song, he didn’t really get it. It confused him. _Stop callin’, stop callin,’ I don’t wanna think anymore_ , Lady Gaga sang. _I left my head and my heart on the dance floor._ Jack knew this was metaphor—he did not think that Lady Gaga had literally left her head and heart on the dance floor—but he just didn’t understand the whole song in general. It seemed like Lady Gaga wanted this other person to call her—was mad that he didn’t—while simultaneously wanting him to leave her alone by not calling her at all. 

“But what does it _mean_?” he asked Cas one time when they were driving around.

Cas went quiet for a moment. “Honestly, I don’t really listen to the lyrics that closely, Jack.”

“You don’t listen to lyrics? Then what’s the point of listening to music at all?”

Cas turned to look out the window, gauging oncoming traffic. “You know, that’s a good question. I used to think a lot about song lyrics when I first landed here, trying to figure out what they meant. I forgot about how strange they seemed, until you just mentioned it.” He kept staring through the windshield. “I didn’t understand why shorty wants a thug, or what lollipops have to do with … well, the human imagination, it boggles. Trust me, Jack, humans never stop coming up with creative ways to say uncomplicated things.” Cas pulled out onto the highway and hit the accelerator. “But the longer I’ve been here, the more I’ve come to realize that humans don’t treat music the same way angels treat music. It’s just a distraction or something to dance to. The words don’t have to be meaningful in order for the song to be good.”

“Lyrics have to be meaningful for angels?”

“Every song is a prayer in praise of God. For some angels—well, that’s all they do. Sing praises.”

“They don’t get to do anything else?”

“It’s time-intensive work.”

No wonder Cas liked mindless music.

Despite this explanation, Jack listened to “Telephone” intently, soaking up the lyrics— _Boy, the way you blowin’ up my phone won’t make me leave no faster, put my coat on faster, leave my girls no faster._ And when he did so, he thought of his own fathers’ phone etiquette. It was also mysterious, inconsistent. Cas and Dean especially—they were a study in contrast. Cas would often pick up his cellphone before it finished its first ring and just say “Dean,” as if half a ring was too long to let Dean wait.

Dean, on the other hand, didn’t jump at anything, unless they were in the middle of a case or some other life-or-death drama. When he got a phone call during a run-of-the-mill trip to the grocery store, he looked at his phone and sighed before answering.

Sam was somewhere in between. He usually picked up the phone quickly, but he didn’t jump on it the way Cas did.

“Oh, it wasn’t always like that,” Cas explained much later. As they helped rebuild heaven, they reflected on the times they shared with Sam and Dean.

Cas was still so fragile, then—traumatized by his time in the Empty, and from being torn away from Sam and Dean so abruptly. Back in heaven, he was different—fully in touch with the emotions he’d suppressed for so long, the same emotions he’d allowed himself to feel right before he died, and others he’d been carrying around for some time. Happiness, sadness, crippling remorse. Grief. When he told Dean he loved him, he’d cried for the first time in centuries. Now he couldn’t stop crying.

Their roles had been reversed. Jack was now a parent.

Cas was doing his best to keep himself on an even keel. Looking for distractions. So he talked about mundane things, like playing phone tag with Dean.

“I didn’t always answer Dean’s calls right away. It just depended on the circumstances. Sometimes I was busy with things I didn’t want Dean involved with. Other times?” He shrugged. “Other times we were in a fight, and I was being passive aggressive. So I wouldn’t answer calls or texts at all. Not from Dean _or_ Sam. This really used to grind Dean’s gears, but sometimes it was the only way I could …” He trailed off.

Then he began again. “You have to understand. For the first several years I knew Dean, I could reach him in a lot of different ways. Physically, mentally. I could fly to get to him, or I could reach him in his dreams. And if he pissed me off, I could just leave, be on the other side of the world for a while. And I knew this pissed _him_ off. But once I lost my wings …”

“There was a power imbalance.”

Cas cast him a knowing glance. “There was always a power imbalance, Jack.”

Jack knew what Cas meant: that though Cas was an ageless angel of the lord—a celestial being impervious to mundane forms of violence—he was hopelessly in love with Dean Winchester. And he believed that Dean didn’t love him back. Couldn’t love him back—not _like that._

To Cas, this dynamic gave Dean all the power in the world—a kind of bruising power he could unknowingly, thoughtlessly wield against Cas.

If only they’d taken the time to really communicate. If only they’d known.

*

When it comes to family members, you’re not supposed to have favorites. When it comes to being God, you’re not supposed to have favorites either—even though everyone thinks you do.

During his life on earth, Jack often heard many canned statements about God creating all people equal. But he also heard just as many statements to the contrary—that God _didn’t_ create all people equal and He definitely had favorites—people and places and things He liked more than others, and you could tell whom God preferred just by looking around to see who was pretty and thin and tall, or who had the most stuff.

God also had favorite countries. And favorite sports teams. And favorite racehorses. Or—at least it seemed that way.

Jack does not think that Chuck actually favored particular countries or racehorses, but he knows that he played favorites within his own family—or _seemed_ to play favorites—and that’s what led to several millennia of strife both in heaven and on earth. Heaven’s first family could not get its shit together. And that’s partly why his own father (his biological father, the father he doesn’t like to talk about) made so much trouble. 

It’s that trouble he has to work through now. Chuck left such a mess to clean up. The angels all have PTSD.

They’ve been brought back from the Empty, and Jack has instituted a policy of reconciliation for them all. Forgiveness has to be total and complete if it’s going to mean anything. Everyone who’s sincere has been welcomed back into the fold—everyone but Lucifer, because he is not sincere.

He inherited four archangels—one caged—and the first thing he did was downgrade them to regular angels. And really, he hates using the word “downgrade,” as it feeds into their feelings of resentment and self-pity. It’s really not a demotion from Jack’s perspective—just a well-needed adjustment. If God creates all people equal, then that needs to go for angels too. And with all the angels rescued from the Empty and restored to their previous grace, heaven no longer needs the “extra juice” the archangels provided.

Most of the ordinary angels are okay with this policy—or at least they _seem_ okay with it. Most are just grateful to be out of the Empty, and many secretly feared the archangels, knowing that they ran things at the behest of some God that no one else could see or know. For millennia they accepted what the archangels told them at face value—that they needed to do this or that “because God commanded it.” There was comfort in that stability. Even when they took part in terrible things. Even when they had to smite all the children of a particular tribe, start a plague, or trigger a famine. What was there to question, if God commanded it?

Once they discovered that much of that wasn’t true—that Chuck had fucked off and split long ago and the archangels were the ones calling the shots … well, let’s just say they now have “massive trust issues.”

But not all angels feel this way. Jack knows others miss the old system with its hierarchies. These angels also have massive trust issues—they don’t trust _him_. Even though he’s taken all of them back, regardless of what they’ve done, they think he’s got ulterior motives. He himself is half-archangel—did he downgrade the archangels so he wouldn’t have any competition? So that they couldn’t run off and father another nephilim who would someday rival Jack? Or is he just being spiteful? What better way to keep the archangels in their place than take away what made them special?

He wishes he could get all the angels together and tell them the truth: that if he could foist the job onto someone else—someone who wouldn’t make a shitshow of it—he’d do so in a heartbeat. That being God is lonely, even with Amara to help him shoulder the burden, and even with choirs of angels whose sole purpose is to sing praises to him (and actually, he nixed the choir in the first hour—it was weird).

That if he could have what he truly wants—anything in the world—it would be to go back to being a human boy who lived in a bunker with three dads. He misses it. Back when he was dying and he told Dean he’d had a good life? He wasn’t lying.

He had a good life.

*

The only ex-archangel who seems thrilled to be relieved of his higher rank is Gabriel. He often stops by Jack’s office and parks himself there, tinkers with Jack’s fidget toys. (Jack keeps these toys around because they remind him of Sam. He has a couple slinkies, a Rubik’s cube, a gyroscope, a stress ball, some marbles.)

“Don’t stress about my brothers,” Gabriel’s telling him while twirling a plastic tangle around a couple of his fingers. “They’re just bitching. You’d think their asses would be thankful to be out of the Empty, right? But no, they feel _neutered_. Tells you everything you need to know about their fragile little egos. I never needed my extra primordial jim-jam to feel like a ‘real man.’” He makes air-quotes.

Jack gets the feeling that Gabriel just needs someone to talk to. Gabriel could talk all day, every day. So he lets Gabriel talk.

One benefit of being God: he can see right through angels, see what they really look like, the particular dimensions of their wavelengths. He can see who they are and everything they’ve ever done, good or bad. He can see every memory they have, even the memories they’ve had erased.

He can see what the Empty did to them, the scars it left.

Who told them they didn’t have emotions? It was a grand lie, one repeated so often that it became truth. These are among the most sensitive, fragile creatures he’s encountered so far. They’re supposed to be _unfeeling soldiers of God_? No wonder they had to be mindwiped so often—it was the only way to keep that myth intact.

It saddens him that they don’t know themselves.

“Anyway,” Gabriel says, “you’re doing the right thing. Neither of them are stable. I wouldn’t leave them in charge of, like, a jellyfish.” He reaches for Jack’s slinky and starts balancing it between his palms. “I mean, to be a member of my family was to be … well, let’s just say I was never going to be pops’ fave. And that was fine with me. Because Michael and Lucifer? It _fucked them up_. And Raphael by extension. Guess I got lucky. They didn’t notice I was missing half the time.”

He plunks the slinky down on Jack’s desk and grins. “Speaking of family, how are your dads? Settling in okay?”

He’s talking about Cas and Dean, who have been recently reunited. Dean arrived in heaven with few troubles; Jack was there to greet him, and so was Cas. “They’re good.”

“Yeah? Are they, you know … shacked up together? Building a little love nest? Oh, sorry. I shouldn’t ask about things like that. It’s, I know. Your _dads_.” He smiles more broadly. “And also none of my business.”

This is accurate—it’s not Gabriel’s business. Or anybody’s business.

Truth is, Jack is a little amazed by the fact that Cas and Dean’s relationship is such a hot topic among the angels, and not for the reasons he would have imagined. He’s not surprised that the relationship is controversial, that some angels are disapproving—an angel and a human soul together is still considered an unnatural union, regardless of what plane of existence the couple occupies. (He’s also not stupid—he knows that the puritanical angels who say such things are questioning his own legitimacy, his right to be God. They’re implying—not so subtly—that he shouldn’t even exist.)

Cas is also aware of these attitudes. When Dean first arrived, Cas privately went to Jack and told him that if their relationship was going to be a problem—if it was going to jeopardize Jack’s ability to govern the angels—then they could cool it for a while. “Absolutely not,” Jack said, appalled by the idea that some grubby angels’ objections about propriety could keep his dads apart. After all they’d been through! “It’s not negotiable.” Any angel who had a problem with it could, to borrow a phrase from Dean, stick it where the sun shines.

No, what surprises him is the fact that so many angels seem bummed that Cas is “off the market.” They’re fascinated by the relationship not because it involves Dean Winchester … but because it involves _Cas_. The angel everyone always wanted but couldn’t have because he wasn’t interested. Or “never had the occasion.” Or something.

And now he’s gone and settled down with a human soul, of all goddamn things. It took a human to win his heart.

“Oh, you didn’t know?” Gabriel said one time when they were chatting, using a teasing tone that told Jack that he relished being the one to impart this information. “Yeah, your pops. Considered quite a dish around these parts.”

Balthazar confirmed this in a separate conversation. “Heaven’s most eligible bachelor. For the last several millennia, at least. Even _before_ he started hanging with Ren and Stimpy. Made all the more attractive by the fact that he was so dense that he didn’t pick up on his own appeal.” He shrugged, but underneath the bluster lurked a kind of wistfulness. “Sometimes stupid really is sexy. And I mean that in the kindest way possible.” He paused, smirked. “Sort of.”

Now Cas is even sexier because he helped save the world—again—and liberate the Empty. And all the more irresistible because he’s completely and totally unavailable.

Snippets of conversation make their way to Jack. Snippets he hears when he’s supposedly not listening (but of course he can hear everything—when he wants to, anyway).

Metatron: “Why Castiel? I admit never saw the allure. On earth I figured it was the vessel. But here? I mean, _really_?”

Ion: “You never saw him on the battlefield. That was a big part of it.”

Ingrid: “Forget the battlefield. Castiel was like catnip for supernatural beings of all stripes. Demons, demigods, reapers …”

Bartholomew: “That’s why he was always so easy to find. You could sic anything on that guy’s ass, and get results yesterday.”

Anna: “I was his superior, so it was strictly business between us. _Castiel_ was always strictly business. But was the temptation there? On my end? Well … _duh_.”

Thaddeus: “You weren’t his type anyway.”

Anna: “Neither were you, apparently.”

Indra: “The fact that he was strictly business was what made him … _interesting_.”

Metatron, again: “I still don’t get it. But I guess there’s no accounting for taste.”

Asariel: “Yeah, yours. You’re alone on that island, Metatron.”

He doesn’t ask Cas about any of this, not when he visits with him and Dean at the Roadhouse or in their home, where they’re so comfortable together, and so happy. (One benefit of being God: he can be in many places at once.) He just marvels at the irony: for years Cas pined for Dean, the human who stirred something inside him he didn’t know he had, the person he thought he couldn’t have. All the while, everyone else was pining for Cas. Jack hadn’t expected that. Among his three dads, it was just a known fact: Dean was the coolest and Sam was the smartest and Cas was the dorkiest.

Even Cas’s taste in music was lame. Dean was always quick to point this out.

Now it’s hard to imagine Cas and Dean ever being apart. In heaven they live together; they seem to spend every waking minute together, if you could measure time in heaven by minutes. When Jack visits, he finds them tangled on the sofa, or working together in the kitchen. Dean likes to surprise Cas by coming up to him from behind, putting his arms around him and kissing him on the cheek or the neck. Jack’s never seen two beings so purely happy.

He doesn’t even have to visit them to feel it. To know it. That kind of love radiates and reshapes heaven. It’s not unlike _worship_ … but the word doesn’t do this thing justice. They lie facing each other, foreheads touching, and Cas teaches Dean all the ways to say “I love you” in Enochian. And in other ancient languages, languages no one’s spoken since the first words were hewn from sound. Dean mispronounces. He tries again. And again. Cas figures out what he’s doing and says he’ll kiss him only if he makes an honest attempt. And Dean says, yeah right, you’ll kiss me anyway. And Cas says, oh will I? Dean says, I’d bet the farm on it. Cas says, we don’t have a farm and Dean says, yeah, not yet, just you wait. Then he presses his lips to Cas’s and says, in imperfect but perfectly understandable Enochian: _You’re like a sunset that never ends_. Cas’s breath catches—in this world, there are things that still surprise him, times when he doesn’t have words. All he can do is clutch Dean as they fold into each other again.

There are oceans within oceans, things they’ll spend eons learning about each other.

 _This is eternity. Take it_.

*

When it comes to family and when it comes to being God, you’re not supposed to have favorites. Jack thinks his life on earth prepared him for this pretty well.

If you ask him, he can’t tell you which of his dads was his favorite. He didn’t have a favorite. He loved them all equally but differently. There was Cas, of course, the father he chose and knew before he was born. The father who staked his life on Jack’s right to exist, and who watched over his mother.

There was Sam, who was sensitive and diplomatic and approachable and kind. Jack could not have adjusted to human life without Sam. (Sam was always meant to be a father. He’s still on earth, and he thinks he’ll never be a father again, it hurt too much—but Jack knows better.)

Then there was Dean. Dean, who tried to kill him when he was born. The same Dean who couldn’t watch him die. Also the same Dean who aimed a gun at his head after he killed Mary with the firm understanding that taking Jack out would kill him as well, but couldn’t bring himself to pull the trigger. 

Their relationship was complicated, to put it mildly. But still, there’s this: Jack’s personal heaven. When Jack died and went to the other side and opened his eyes, he was with Dean. Outside a diner. And Dean had a map unfolded on Baby’s hood and was showing him how to read it.

His happiest memory.

He puzzles over this. If you’d asked him in advance to name his best memory, he might have said the day Cas walked through the door, alive again. Or the day he spent with Dean, learning to drive, and going fishing. Or the day Sam taught him how to use the internet, or made him breakfast.

Why the map?

Maybe it was because they were all together, working a case for the first time with Cas back from the dead. Maybe because it was so spontaneous, so unexpected. Because Dean had gone from barely uttering one-syllable words in his direction to addressing him by name and wanting to teach him something. 

Or maybe it was because Dean was happy, finally, and that Jack was part of what made him happy, not sad. Not angry. 

“I worry about you,” Sam said to him one time.

They were in the reading room, and Sam was making his way to the hallway. He stopped in front of the table where Jack was working.

Cas and Dean were elsewhere, so Jack and Sam were the only ones around. 

Jack looked up from the computer.

“The way my brother talks to you sometimes—it sucks. It isn’t right. He talks to you the way our dad talked to him, and it was one thing when you first got here, but now …” He paused, shook his head. “You don’t have to put up with it, Jack. When he says something you don’t like or that makes you feel bad, you need tell him to knock it off. If you don’t, it’ll just get worse.”

Jack rolled up one of his shirtsleeves. “It’s really not a big deal, Sam.”

“Yes, it is. And that’s what worries me about you. You want his approval in the same way he wanted our dad’s approval. But Jack, you don’t need his approval. You’re fine the way you are.”

Jack lowered his gaze to stare at the computer screen again.

“I dealt with our dad differently. Dean wanted his approval in the worst way, and I decided I didn’t give a shit. I decided to do my own thing. And at the time it sucked. It helped me in the long run, but at the time I was the odd-man out. But you won’t be. You have me and you have Cas.” He paused again, staring into the corner of the room. “That’s the other thing. Cas should stand up for you better. But when it comes to Dean, Cas doesn’t …” He trailed off, seemingly lost in thought.

“Cas doesn’t what?”

Sam looked down, shook his head. “He has his own issues with Dean. I’m going to talk to him, too. But don’t worry about that. Just—think about what I said.”

Sam is his only dad left on earth, and Jack checks in on him often. He’s not supposed to intervene, but he can’t help but do small things for Sam. Minor miracles. He makes sure a particularly fierce downpour doesn’t begin until Sam’s finished with his morning run. He protects his alarm clock from a power surge the night before he has a job interview. And when Miracle wanders off one day and Sam can’t find him, Jack guides the dog through a busy intersection and steers him to a nice couple who keep him safe and call the phone number on his tag.

When Sam is reunited with Miracle in a parking lot near a hiking trail, he thanks the couple effusively but waits until he’s back in the Impala before breaking down. Miracle’s sitting shotgun (he always sits shotgun), and Sam throws his arms around him, buries his face in Miracle’s neck. Cries for a solid ten minutes.

Sam thinks he’ll always be lonely without his family, that he’ll never be happy again as long as he’s alive. But this isn’t true—Jack knows this. _Trust me, Sam. I said I wouldn’t leave you._ He’s not alone, and he won’t be lonely. Not for much longer. He’ll have a family again.

*

Jack died twice before he left earth. Maybe three times, if you count exploding inside the Empty.

The first time he died was the worst. The last time he died was the worst. He still can’t decide.

Coming back after the first time—well, there was the awareness that his soul was a finite resource. It was slipping away from him.

There was also the devastating truth: Cas had traded his life for Jack’s. He’d made a deal—the very worst kind. They talked about it only that one time over cereal, when Cas told him not to worry because he wasn’t happy and definitely wouldn’t be happy for the foreseeable future. “This life may be a lot of things, but it’s rarely happy,” Cas said.

“I’m sorry,” Jack said, and at the time he didn’t know why he said that. But later he knew: Cas would stay alive only if he remained unhappy, and that was Jack’s doing. And later, another thought would occur to him, one that wounded him deeply: Jack didn’t make Cas happy. Not really. Not in the incandescent way that would get Cas killed.

He knew Cas had been trying to comfort him, but Jack still felt hurt. _I’m not enough to make him happy_. But over time he felt less hurt and more curious (a process that probably correlated with the slow loss of his soul), and as he stared at the ceiling each night, he wondered what Cas thought when he thought about true happiness.

He studied Cas in those days, monitoring his every mood.

He remembers the night they went out to a bar together, just the four of them. They needed a break. Michael was knocking around in Dean’s head and Dean was acting like it wasn’t so bad— _no sweat, bro, I just need to get out a bit_ —but by the end of the evening he didn’t trust himself to drive. He pretended it was because he’d had too much to drink, but he’d hardly had anything at all.

Sam didn’t want to drive because he’d been drinking, which left Cas and Jack. Naturally, Cas got the keys. Dean argued for shotgun, but Sam told him to get in the back—he needed the dashboard light to get some work done and get in touch with his people at the bunker. So Dean ended up in the back. With Jack.

Then Cas turned on the radio. Fiddled with the dial until he found the pop station.

“Jesus, Cas,” Dean said.

The song “Sweet but Psycho” was playing, a song Jack liked and now understood, thanks to his time with Harper Sayles. Harper was sweet but psycho—that much was obvious. He remembered when Dean recapped the case for Sam, and Sam looked at Dean, horrified. “Dean, what the hell. You used Jack as a honey trap?”

“What? No,” Dean said. Then he looked at Jack. Couldn’t help but grin a little. “Well, I mean, if things had gone in that direction … maybe.”

“What’s a honey trap?” Jack asked.

“Watch _The Americans_ some time,” Dean said. “Or better yet, ask Cas, when he gets his feathery ass back here. He fell for a honey trap once.” He started laughing.

Jack pulled out his phone to do some googling, but Sam reached over and touched his wrist. “Honey trapping is when someone sleeps with the target of an investigation to get information. They pretend to be interested in the person romantically, but really they’re trying to get intel or blackmail material. It’s a thing spies do.”

“And Cas fell for that?”

Dean just laughed. Could not stop laughing.

The corners of Sam’s mouth twitched. “It wasn’t funny at the time Dean.”

“At least he had his angel blade for protection.” Now they both laughed.

Jack made a mental note to ask Cas about this later. “So … this is a thing we do? As hunters? We sleep with people to get information.”

Sam and Dean stopped laughing and just looked at him. Then Sam grinned at Dean, gave his shoulder a light punch. “Sleeping with people for dubious reasons is Dean’s territory,” he told Jack. “He can explain it a lot better than I can. Have fun, Dean.” He strolled out of the kitchen.

Now “Sweet but Psycho” was blaring through car’s speakers, and Dean was pissed. “Cas, turn that off.”

“Cas, don’t turn that off,” Sam said. He glanced over his shoulder to look at Dean. “Cas is driving. He gets to pick the music.”

“I get to pick the music,” Cas echoed.

“Well your taste in music sucks.” Dean flounced around in the backseat, staring out the window.

“I like music that’s popular,” Cas said. “That means a lot of people like it. So a lot of people disagree with you, Dean.”

“A lot of people are dumb.”

“Christ, Dean,” Sam said. “You sound like you’re about twelve.”

Cas sighed. “Most people like music that’s fun and upbeat, Dean. They don’t like sad music about … Tuesday dying with the wind. They like music that makes them happy. This music makes me happy.”

Jack tensed a bit, thought about asking, “How happy?” But he realized that Cas didn’t mean really, truly happy. It would take more than Lady Gaga or Beyoncé or Sia or Rihanna to put him in the kind of state that would make him ripe for the Empty. 

“First of all,” Dean began, “it’s ‘Tuesday’s _gone_ with the wind,’ not ‘Tuesday’s dying with the wind.’ Second of all, Baby is a pussy magnet, and Baby can’t fulfill that role with a bunch of lame-ass cheesy-ass pop music booming from the speakers. Baby is confused by this kind of music and deserves better.”

“Baby needs to suck it up,” Sam said. “If Baby’s ego is too fragile to handle, like, an Ava Max single, then Baby has bigger problems.”

Dean was quiet for a moment. “I can’t believe you even know the name of the singer.”

“Yeah, because I live in the world, Dean, and because I don’t stake my fucking identity on the music I listen to.” He turned around to stare at Dean one final time. “I don’t have … identity issues.” Then he turned around again, went back to his phone. 

“What the fuck is that supposed to mean?”

Sam didn’t say anything. He just scrolled through his phone.

“Huh?”

“Nothing. Forget it.”

Dean thumped his foot on the car floor and looked out the window in a way that told Jack he wasn’t about to forget anything.

The mood inside the car felt tight and toxic and very uncomfortable, and now Selena Gomez was asking who’s gonna walk you through the dark side of the morning. _It ain’t me_. Cas reached over to turn off the radio, but Sam stilled his hand. “Leave it.”

Jack was glad they left it, because right after that he started to cough. At least the music drowned out the worst of it.

“Jack, you okay?” Cas asked, his eyes catching Jack’s in the rearview mirror.

Dean turned to look.

“Yeah, fine.” Jack cleared his throat.

But he was lying. His illness—his systemic failure or preternatural lupus or chronic nephilim autoimmune disorder or whatever the fuck you wanted to call it—hadn’t gone away. He’d burned off a piece of his soul just to get back to Sam and Dean, not to be made completely well.

And Cas had made the ultimate sacrifice … for what, exactly? So Jack could die again. And where would he go now?

No, he had to stay alive. To protect Cas, to protect Sam and Dean. Whatever it took. If it took more of his soul, then he had to make the sacrifice.

This was another realization—a grim realization—that prepared him for his current role as God: he had no parents. As much as Cas and Sam and Dean tried to take care of him, they couldn’t. And for as much as Cas had provided for him emotionally, he couldn’t do so once he made the deal, a deal that lay between them like a sword in the grass. They could never go back.

Once Jack became God, he became responsible for all these damaged entities back from the Empty. He had to help them make sense of their existence, of the things they’d done and the paths they’d chosen. Cas especially. He was … a mess. He’d helped liberate the Empty, driven partly by guilt. He’d sent so many of his kin there, unknowingly.

Cas took time and energy to rehabilitate, and during that time he clung to Jack—Jack, the son who’d suddenly become the parent. The parent Cas had longed for his entire life.

Jack was glad he could be there for Cas. But underneath it all, he wanted something different. He wished their roles hadn’t been reversed so swiftly, that Cas was the one running heaven, calling the shots, and comforting him—just as he’d done on earth. He longed to tell him that he didn’t really want this job at all and wasn’t sure he could do it.

Even now, he still wishes he had someone—anyone—to tell. _It ain’t me_.

*

“The fact that you don’t want the job is why you’re right for it.”

Gabriel says this to him one day. He’s decided to take some time away—his “day of rest” (though everyone knows that God never has the day off, the whole concept is bullshit)—and decides to see his mother. Gabriel was hanging around when he made the decision, and on the spur of the moment, Jack extended him an offer to come along.

When Jack’s mom sees Gabriel with Jack, she says he looks familiar. (When they go among humans, even in heaven, they tend to present themselves as they did on earth. It’s just less confusing.) “I just have one of those super common faces,” Gabriel says. “I think there’s someone who looks like me in every town.”

“You look like someone who could have been an actor.”

“Well, I did do a little Shakespeare in the Park.”

Kelly likes to spend her time near a shoreline that looks sort of like Northern California or Southern New Zealand. He did not create this place for her—she created it herself. He wishes people understood this better—he didn’t remake heaven; _they_ did. He simply took down the walls. Humans’ choices and longings make heaven what it is now. People decided they wanted room to explore, to try things out. They wanted to have a purpose apart from eternal rest, so now heaven makes it possible for people to help other people, to counsel souls who spent time in the veil, or who died unexpectedly. They can keep building heaven as they see fit.

And if they want to relive their fondest memories, they can still do that. But most choose otherwise.

Some of the angels facilitate these projects, helping carry out the administrative tasks that keeps heaven running efficiently. Without a looming apocalypse or a threat from Lucifer, they can be more like the helpers they were once intended to be.

“Heard about Dumah’s meltdown,” Gabriel says as they walk along the beach.

It’s just the two of them now—Jack’s mother walked with them for a while before deciding to sit on a warm rock where she could watch the tide go out. Jack knows that Kelly is a private, thoughtful, complicated woman who’s comforted by scenery, and who loves solitude as much as she enjoys seeing other people. Dean and Cas visit her often, but for the most part she enjoys being alone. So when she stays behind for a few minutes, it’s nothing unusual.

“Who’d you hear it from?” Jack asks.

“Let me think. Hmm. Samandriel, Hester, Balthazar, Inias, Purah, Samandriel again, who circled back with updates, and Sister Jo. Who was apparently outside the door when it happened. And doesn’t like to be called by that stupid name anymore, which means we’re going to call her ‘Sister Jo’ until the end of time.” Hands in his pockets, Gabriel shrugs. “Angels don’t do ‘personal space’ very well. Bunch of chatty-Cathys. Zero boundaries. If you thought the size of your underwear was private, think again.”

“It wasn’t even the only meltdown this week,” Jack says. “Or the most intense. By half.”

“But it was Dumah. And therefore interesting.”

Dumah was trying to receive prayers. From earth.

Only the strongest angels can receive prayers from earth these days, which they relay to Jack. (Jack also receives prayers from earth—angels just help lighten the load.)

Most angels—Dumah included—aren’t up to full strength. Receiving prayers from human souls in heaven isn’t a problem for most, but receiving prayers from earth—with all the pain that comes with them—requires an entirely different disposition. A degree of inner-peace.

The angels know this. But every week, it never fails: another angel tries to exceed what they’re currently capable of, and they get hurt.

This past week two angels found Dumah lying on the ground under a table in a common area, knees to her chest, hands clutching her head. They called for him; he dropped everything and came immediately.

“Dumah,” he said, crouching next to the table. He knelt. “You know you can’t—”

“Don’t touch me!” She recoiled when he drew a little closer, inching away so that she was pressed against a wall. _You’ll know everything I’ve done_.

Angels can tell a great deal about each other through touch, but Jack isn’t really an angel. So he doesn’t have to touch anyone to know everything they’ve done. He just _knows_ , and he knows everything about Dumah already. Moreover, he’s got his personal memories—how she used him when he didn’t have a soul, tricking him into killing people and making more angels. When Cas put a stop to it, she threatened to fuck with John and Mary Winchester’s heaven.

If Naomi was “complicated,” as Cas put it, then Dumah was downright awful. But not for nothing. Jack could see past the scar tissue and into a layer of regrets, and then into memories Dumah doesn’t know she still has, memories that have been wiped, memories of battlefields and bloodletting, and then, beyond all that, into the memories Dumah doesn’t let herself revisit. She denies herself these memories—a kind of self-starvation. For instance, she won’t allow herself to remember the ten-thousand-year stretch she spent with Ion on the outermost reaches of creation. Basic security detail, nothing terribly fraught or complicated. Angels either loved or hated this assignment—some considered it plum while others got bored quickly. It depended on your personality, and whether you got along with your partner.

Sometimes you pretended to hate it even though you really loved it. To admit you loved it was to admit you didn’t really want to be doing anything incredibly angelic—not smiting or fighting or going undercover to gather intel on some demon’s shenanigans.

Dumah was one of those angels who secretly loved the stillness of creation. She and Ion bonded and never tired of each other’s company. They developed a repertoire of dry, witty observations about the edges of time and space. (Jokes that definitely sounded funnier in Enochian.)

Then, all at once, they were brought back and reassigned, and that was the end of the time they shared.

So when Jack _did_ indeed reach out to touch Dumah, she reacted physically, swinging an arm to push him back. The other two angels in the room backed away, but Jack subdued her easily by holding her arm behind her back. Instead of putting her to sleep, as he did with a lot of angels who freaked out, Jack just spoke to her plainly, telepathically, telling her that he already knew what she’d done and that forgiveness was available, if she wanted it.

 _How can you stand to even look at me_ , she thought.

He let her see the things she wouldn’t allow herself to remember, the years spent on the edge of the universe. _Because I know you. You used to be happy_.

Pressed against the floor, Dumah relented, going slack. The tension left her body.

Jack finally felt assured enough to turn around to look at the other two angels in the room. His eyes settled on Jofiel. “Go get Ion,” he said in Enochian. Jofiel spun on his heels to leave the room.

Jack turned his attention back to Dumah.

 _I just want to help_ , she said.

“You will.”

When Jofiel returned minutes later, Ion in tow, Dumah was stable enough the she’d been moved into a sitting position.

“Dumah,” Ion said, startled. He made his way into the room.

Jack gently pulled Dumah to her feet, guided her to Ion. “You’re her friend,” he said in Enochian. “You were her friend for a long time. Be her friend now.”

As Dumah and Ion embraced, Jack looked at the other two angels and nodded to the door. It was time for them to leave. All of them, even Jack.

Now Gabriel turns to look at the ocean, its waves crashing along the shore. “Okay,” he says to Jack. “It’s not just Dumah. It was your response to her. A bit epic. Our, um— _Chuck_ —never did anything like that. I suppose that’s part of what makes it such a juicy piece of gossip.”

Jack feels like rolling his eyes. He just did his best, that’s all.

“The angels like you. They didn’t want to initially. And let me tell you, they’re a tough audience. But you’re winning hearts and minds, my friend. In a big way.”

In spite of his being Lucifer’s son, right. And getting the job basically because Chuck wasn’t fit for it anymore.

He understands why many angels are still skeptical of his efforts: he didn’t create them. He didn’t really create anything. He just hopes to understand them better, in some way.

“I know you don’t want this job,” Gabriel continues. “Nobody should want this job. The fact that you don’t want the job is why you’re right for it. Anybody who wants to be God should be automatically disqualified because they’re probably a fucking narcissist. At best.” He pauses. “Like my brothers.”

Jack doesn’t have to ask—he knows that Gabriel still hasn’t made too many inroads with Michael. Raphael is a little different—he seems to be coming along. But it’s still a long, slow process. And for Gabriel, very personal. He feels like a failure.

Jack understands. Growing up with the Winchesters taught him a great deal about these familial dynamics. Sam and Dean and Cas fought a lot. Constantly, and over the dumbest fucking things—like music or food or who got to sit where in the car.

All the same, though, Sam and Dean and Cas couldn’t stay angry with each other for centuries on end.

Jack thinks this might be one of the major benefits of mortality. If normal human families want to get along, they don’t have forever to make up their minds. They can’t hold eternal grudges.

Back before Dean arrived in heaven—when Cas was still helping him rebuild things—Jack got Cas to go into more detail about what they fought about. Reasons Cas didn’t pick up the phone.

“What _didn’t_ we fight about?” Cas ran through a list of things he did wrong, like backroom deals with Crowley and the shit with the leviathans. Or failing to retrieve Sam’s soul from the cage. Killing Billie. Et cetera. And then more regular ho-hum shit—not checking in often enough. There were the things that Dean did, that pissed Sam off—tricking Sam into letting Gadreel possess him, and keeping secrets from him, up until the end. And the things that Sam did—failing to look for Dean when he was in purgatory, leaving Kevin Tran in the wind.

And Jack. They fought all the time about Jack. Cas doesn’t mention it, but Jack knows he was the reason for many of their fights. For a lot of strife.

He knows that the most wounded Cas ever felt was the time he walked out of the bunker because Dean blamed him for Mary. And Cas needed Dean right then—needed him like he’d never needed anything. Earlier that day he’d burned a demon out of Jack’s dead body. He’d watched Jack die _again_. But Dean was too angry. Couldn’t even look at him.

Still, they managed to work past it. They had to.

Gabriel’s brothers don’t have that incentive. And Jack knows that deep down inside, Gabriel thinks they’re right about him. That he’s a flunky, a flake. He skipped out on every major biblical and historical event since Chuck split. They needed him and he wasn’t there.

Jack feels like telling Gabriel that he doesn’t have to prove anything to him. He’s good and loyal now—that’s enough. He also knows that Gabriel is one of these angels who seems fine—but isn’t. He might have more scars than Dumah.

“Do you miss it?” Gabriel says, bending over to pick up a piece of driftwood. “Being human, I mean.”

“I don’t miss dying.”

“That’s not what I asked, though.”

“But it is. Dying is what being human is all about. It’s what you spend every day doing, technically. And it fuels everything that you do. I mean, you don’t think about it constantly—if you did, you’d drive yourself crazy. One time, when I was—” He stops, looks down at his feet in the sand.

“What?”

He remembers the first time he died. Dying was painful—anything but peaceful. But he doubts any death is truly peaceful.

He asked Sam what would happen to him, where he’d go. And Sam didn’t bullshit him. Sam held him as he died. He did what Dean couldn’t. Dean left the room and Cas went after him. He almost has to laugh about it now—it perfectly encapsulated their family dynamics: Dean angry with himself for failing, again (even when it wasn’t his failure), Cas running after Dean to comfort him, and Sam staying steady. Sam’s hand on his. Telling him it was okay to go, even though it wasn’t.

He wants to tell Gabriel that there’s nothing good about dying, and that statement would be truthful but not necessarily true. There isn’t anything good about dying except for the fact that you lived, and Jack still knows himself and knows deep down inside that after everything—after giving his mother and Dean and Mary and everyone else the heaven they deserve, and after rescuing the angels and reuniting Cas with Dean—he’d still rather have things back to the way they were before.

He looks at Gabriel. “I’m still human.”

*

In a cave not far from the shore, Gabriel leans over and kisses him. They’re standing, and Jack backs up so that he’s leaning against the cave wall. Their first kisses are short and experimental. Then longer and more involved. Searching. Gabriel’s hands on his waist. Jack’s arms around Gabriel’s shoulders. A hand in Gabriel’s hair.

Gabriel pulls away, propping himself with one hand on the cave’s wall. “I don’t even know what to call you.” He’s feeling more things than Jack can keep track of. Joy. Sadness. Giddiness. Guilt. Relief. Fear. A lot of fear. _What the hell are they doing?_

And underneath all that, he’s just so taken with Jack. Awed, maybe, but not in the ways people talk about being awed by God. Awed more by his own feelings, and by the way Jack coaxes things out of him.

Gabriel sighs, looks away like he’s already resigned himself to this, whatever this is. Then he says, “I just know that I love you. More than anything.”

Jack circles one arm around Gabriel’s waist, pulling him close again. “I’m just Jack.” They start kissing again.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jack confides in Gabriel about the time he spent with the Winchesters and recalls the events leading up to Cas's death. And deals with the pitfalls of angel politics.

Heaven’s having some issues right now because _earth_ is having some issues right now. A lot of souls are anxious about their family members who are still alive. They get reports from the newly dead about natural disasters, crop shortages. Droughts and famines. The climate. “It’s goddamn apocalyptic,” Gabriel says to him, “except that we didn’t do it this time.”

He and Gabriel don’t discuss the day at the beach, but Jack sees the way Gabriel looks at him when he thinks he’s not looking, knows how he admonishes himself for feeling, for wanting. All they did was kiss, but Gabriel is sad. On the outside he’s the same as always—jokey and glib—but Jack can always see beyond affect.

You’re not supposed to want God, Gabriel thinks. Not _like that_. Jack wants to tell him it’s okay, it’ll be okay.

 _I’m still just Jack_ , he wants to say.

Gabriel thinks he doesn’t know how to be an angel, and that his interest in Jack is just more evidence. He’s flaky, he’s a burnout. A degenerate. He’s screwed demigods—so of course he wants to screw _the_ God. Naturally.

There’s also the fact that they’re related, sort of. They’re not related in the way human beings are related—angels are created, not born, and Jack is half human, considered an “unnatural being” by most angels. Not really “one of them.” But all the same, they’re family.

Gabriel also thinks his feelings are probably the result of his "abandonment issues.” For so many eons, he felt abandoned by Chuck, whose long and silent absence was a stinging rebuke. Chuck wasn’t a benevolent God. He was uncaring at best and spiteful at worst.

Then Jack comes along, and he’s nothing like that. He’s not Gabriel’s father; he didn’t create him from fragments of the cosmos. But all the same, he cares. He’s available. So Gabriel reproaches himself for wanting more, for wanting to be close to God rather than just serving him from afar. As any self-respecting angel should be satisfied to do.

Jack just wants to tell Gabriel that there’s no one way to be an angel. That angels are indeed complicated—flawed and creaturely and quirky and complex—just like humans. Whoever led him to believe otherwise wasn’t being very honest. And Jack hates dishonesty.

But right now, there are more important things at hand.

About the topics of climate and earth’s problems, the angels are torn, with some feeling they have a moral obligation to help. Keep the polar bears from drowning and the bees from going extinct. Keep humanity from burning itself out. Others are adamant that earth’s problems are not heaven’s problems. Humans need to figure out how to take care of their piece of creation.

Jack thinks both lines of thinking are uncreative and inelegant—a binary of dark and light, creation and destruction—but he decides to put together a meeting to hear different impressions. He chooses angels who represent a wide variety of viewpoints, careful not to pick just angels he likes personally.

“Sure you don’t want to rope Cas into this?” Gabriel asks before the meeting.

“I’m sure.”

Since helping Jack rebuild heaven, Cas has gone low-profile, taking pains to remain uninvolved in angel politics. Part of it is the optics—he’s Jack’s father, after all, and he’s already breaking a few of heaven’s most ancient laws by shacking up with a human soul. He doesn’t want to further undermine Jack’s position by seeming like he’s getting special treatment. Or look like he’s got undue influence. “When I have any kind of power over other angels, things tend to unravel pretty quickly,” he told Jack. He believes this wholeheartedly.

He also believes completely, steadfastly in Jack and Jack’s judgment. He doesn’t tell Jack what to think, doesn’t share his thoughts about other angels. He’s convinced that Jack knows what’s best, and that Jack can make up his own mind about whom to trust. (Still, he drops hints. “I hope Ishim’s okay. Any trouble with him?”)

So Jack ends up in a room with a motley crowd—Gabriel, Raphael, Naomi, Balthazar, Samandriel, Uriel, Anna, Muriel, Rebecca, Indra, Eremiel, Joshua, and Ambriel.

With so many strong personalities, Jack knows the conversation will probably go south. He doesn’t moderate—he just listens, sussing out who’s sincere and who couldn’t care less.

Ambriel crunches the numbers, running simulations on how much time humans have left based on a series of variables.

“It wouldn’t be the first mass extinction we’ve seen,” Uriel says.

“No,” Naomi says, “but if we’re talking about whether heaven can accommodate all these souls in short order—the planet’s never been more populated than it is right now.”

“They’re not going to die _all at once_ ,” Balthazar says. “It’ll be like the apocalypse. You know, the one that didn’t happen. Slow.”

Ambriel scrolls through a spreadsheet. “Well actually … they could all die at once. But true, the possibility is a remote one. This will most likely be a very gradual process. According to an aggregate reading of the European models, anyway.”

Anna looks up. “Listen to the way we’re discussing this. Like it’s a done deal. These aren’t statistics. These are people and they still have choices. Our first priority should be finding ways to help them. Not, I don’t know, fiddling while Rome burns.”

“Nero actually did not do that,” Indra says. “I was there.”

“I might have been there too. Funny, though, I can’t remember.” Anna levels a stare at Naomi. “Recollection’s a little fuzzy.”

“Okay,” Rebecca says, trying to defuse the tension. “If we’re going to gently help humans with their … crisis, what are some actionable and reasonable steps we might take?”

“We can’t help,” Raphael says. “Because there aren’t any reasonable solutions at this point. Because humans aren’t reasonable.”

Jack invited Raphael to this discussion as a good-faith gesture. Same with Naomi. He doesn’t like either of them on a personal level—even though he has to love everyone (and he does). As far as Naomi—well, he’s seen the files from her various black-ops projects, and they make him ill. But all the same, he agrees with Cas—she’s always tried to do what’s best for human souls. 

Raphael he’s not as sure about. And now Raphael has everyone’s attention.

“They’ve been warned for years about this crisis, and they don’t care. We’ve given them all manner of revelation, and they still don’t care. They can see pictures of a glacier melting away in real time, and they deny what they’re even looking at. They ignore it at best. Call it ‘fake news’ at worst. And even the best of them? They feel or terrible or scared … and then they forget all about it and continue on with their daily lives.”

No one says anything.

“We’ve all but painted it in the sky that they’re in trouble. They’ve gotten signs—tons of signs. Entire years without winter. Entire species extinct. They have the technology to solve the problem. They just refuse to do so, like the recalcitrant children they are. What else can we do? Bail them out of this crisis? Brothers, sisters, that’s the _worst_ thing we could do. Then they have no incentive to change their ways. They go on to do something worse. Set off a chain reaction in another galaxy. Who knows.”

Gabriel swivels in his chair. “Okay, you’ve just jumped to several conclusions based on what Rebecca said. Nobody’s talking about blazing saddles to the rescue. We know we don’t intervene that way.” He looks quickly at Jack and then looks back to Raphael. “We’re talking about actionable, reasonable ways to help.”

“Which are what, Gabriel?” Raphael leans forward. “The time for small, incremental solutions was forty years ago. They don’t have any of those left. This crisis calls for huge interventions, which have to come from humans themselves. We can’t do that for them. We can’t just—look, there’s such a thing as moral hazard. Their behavior brought them to this place.”

Gabriel throws up one of his hands. “You’re going to lecture _me_ about moral hazard? You’re the one who let Ken Lay into heaven!”

“Well, you weren’t there to object at the time. You were playing grab-ass in another galaxy. And weren’t you just now implying that humanity is too big to fail?”

“Actually,” Balthazar says, “Naomi’s the one who implied—”

“Oh, go to hell, Raphael. I never said any such thing.”

“Hold on a minute—”

“Your problem,” Raphael says, “is that you over-identify with humanity. With their lack of self-control. And I get it. You fucked up some hundred thousand times. And you always found someone to turn to, someone to bail you out. So, I feel where you’re coming from, I really do. You sympathize with them. Hell, _I_ sympathize with them. I fucked up too. But there’s only one of you and one of me. And eight billion of them.”

“That’s—the point,” Gabriel says, bending forward, bringing his hands together. “There are eight billion of them. And only a fraction of a fraction have culpability in this crisis. Or the power to stop it. A few wealthy countries and their multinational corporations. We’re talking about the suffering of billions of people who have no power. We’re talking about _mass starvation_. Displacement. Wars.”

It’s clear to Jack that Gabriel and Raphael are showboating, and that the rest of the angels are popcorning. He figured the discussion would end this way, but he didn’t think they’d arrive here so quickly.

“So what are you suggesting?” Raphael says. “Smite the few, save the many? Name one time that’s worked.”

Gabriel shakes his head but continues to stare at Raphael. He leans back in his chair. “You’re still a heartless bastard. You know what? If the spirit animals of Jeff Bezos and, I don’t know … Mark Zuckerberg had a baby … you’d still be a bigger asshole.”

“And you know what you are?” Raphael says, pointing at Gabriel. Jack can tell he’s trying to come up with a particularly brutal smite. “You’re the same Gabriel you were during the Bronze Age. Awfully smart—except when you want to be.”

“Stop,” Jack says, holding up his hand. He shouldn’t have let things get to this point—this kind of showmanship and cheap bloodletting. He considers snapping them all away but figures that would be just as cheap and performative. “This is … this is not what we do. _This_ … is beneath us. All of us.” He looks at Gabriel. Then he dismisses them. Tells them he’s not making any decisions about a taskforce until later. Even though he’s already made up his mind.

Later, Gabriel finds him in his office.

Yes, God has an office. It’s as Jack wants it: small and modest and windowless. He doesn’t really _need_ an office—he can be anywhere and often is everywhere. All at once, in heaven and on earth and in all the galaxies that exist. But he still likes having a small corner to call his own, a room where the angels can drop in at any time and see him face-to-face. And its trappings—its bare scrubby walls and unadorned filing cabinets—remind him of how a lot of people on earth spend their days. How his mother spent her days before she landed her dream job at the White House—in a cubicle, at first, and then in a small windowless office. And then, finally, in something a little nicer.

What can he say, he’s sentimental.

Gabriel appears in the doorway and slumps against the frame. “I’m sorry. About all that.”

Jack looks up from his desk and squints at him. “Are you?”

Gabriel doesn’t say anything.

“Well,” Jack says, “I’m sure it’s already all over angel radio. More ammunition for those who say I’m just a nephilim in over his head.”

He gets up from behind his desk to put a file in the cabinet, thinks about how there are angels who trust him and angels who don’t. He knows that those who don’t have their reasons—they’ve lived through a decade of strife—of one power vacuum after another—where every new leader managed to decimate and demoralize them further. Where _Lucifer himself_ came to heaven and managed to subjugate those who were there. And now they have to deal with his son. 

For thousands of years they’d done whatever they were told; as soon as they stopped blindly following orders, everything fell apart. They see Jack as just another installment in that saga. Those who don’t trust him tend to speak to him only in Enochian. They know it’s not his first language—he does pretty well in it, but it’s not his favorite—so it’s another way to test his patience.

“No one says that. Look.” Gabriel comes into the office and closes the door and leans against it. “I was out of line. I didn’t mean to sandbag the whole meeting. My brother and I, our crap—we should have left it outside the door.”

“Well, that’s true. But it’s also not the whole truth.” He opens the filing cabinet and finds the tab he’s looking for. Slips the file inside. “You’re lying to me, Gabriel. And? I don’t like lying.” He closes the filing cabinet with a click.

Gabriel doesn’t say anything, but he seems to fold into himself. To get a little smaller.

Jack turns to face him. “What happened in there wasn’t a mistake on your part. You knew what you were doing. You went in there to tank that meeting. And it wouldn’t—” He pauses for a moment, trying to collect his thoughts. “It wouldn’t piss me off so much if you hadn’t tried to snow me as well.”

Neither of them says anything for a long time.

Gabriel finally speaks. “I’m sorry, Jack.”

“You’ve already said that. Because it’s easier that way, right? It’s easier to apologize to me and get forgiveness than it is to honestly try hard at something, and then fail … and feel like you’ve disappointed me. Or disappointed the other angels. Or yourself. Again.”

Gabriel looks down. Unfolds his hands. “I don’t know what you want me to say, Jack.”

Jack says nothing. He’s not sure what he wants Gabriel to say either.

“I’m not Cas, Jack. I’m just not. I just—” He looks away and rubs his chin. “I don’t have it in me to be that kind of angel.”

“But … why would I need you to be?”

Gabriel seems to reconsider him.

“So, that’s why you wanted me to bring Cas into this. Because you think Cas … can solve global warming.”

He imagines how Sam and Dean would react to this kind of moment—the absurdity of it. For a second he’s back in the bunker, the warmth of their laughter filling the halls. Cas, who fell for a honey trap. Cas, who had terrible taste in music. That Cas? _Their_ Cas?

“Okay, so this is the thing.” Gabriel sighs and relaxes a bit as he registers Jack’s amusement. “He took longshots. And sure, he sometimes lacked imagination. But what he lacked in imagination he certainly made up for in … I don’t know. Sheer pluck, I guess. The guy had a talent for failing upwards.” He shrugged. “You have to understand, Jack. Here or elsewhere, in all of heaven and earth, there was no one like him. Ever.” He pauses. “And I would know. I’ve been here—and everywhere—for a very long time.”

“He had other people helping him. And me, sometimes. And the former king and current queen of hell, sometimes. And he didn’t always fail upwards.”

“He didn’t. But he never—” Gabriel pushes himself from the door. “I don’t know. It’s like he didn’t care. He just did what was right. Whatever it took.” Gabriel peers at him. “ _No one_ did that before he did. Or I should say, no one ever did that kind of thing for the benefit of humanity. Not at such a high cost to themselves.”

Jack knows that Cas did care about other angels—he cared a lot. It hurt him deeply that angels despised him so much. But at the end of the day, he knew he had Dean. Dean would always take him back. And that was what kept him honest. Kept him trying.

Jack glances back up at Gabriel. “He was indeed brave. Cas. But … he’s not here right now, so it’s beside the point. You have the job.”

“What?”

“You’re leading this taskforce. Garrison. Whatever you want to call it. And you know why? Because you don’t want it. You demonstrated that in that meeting. And the fact that you don’t want it is why you’re right for it.”

“Yeah, about that.” Gabriel leans back against the door again. “When I said that to you, it was different. You’re God.”

“But I also happen to agree.”

“You know I didn’t even believe half the shit I was saying in that meeting. I was just being contrarian.”

Jack smiles. “Your brother didn’t believe half the shit he was saying either.”

“Will he … will he be on the taskforce?” Gabriel’s eyes search Jack’s.

“That’s up to you.” Jack closes the space between them.

“Jack—” Gabriel’s face is creased with worry. “You can’t trust me with something this big. I—I’m not—I’m—” It’s like he can’t figure out which sentence to finish. “You know what I am. And if you don’t, you’ll find out. I’m not the right person for this. At all.”

Jack puts his hand on Gabriel’s shoulder. “I trust you. I also know you might fail. We all might fail. It might not be something we can win, and I have no idea the degree to which we’ll intervene, at this point. Or if we’ll intervene at all.” He looks directly at Gabriel, and Gabriel returns his gaze. “But the fact that you’ll try—it’ll mean something either way. And you won’t be alone.”

*

This happens only once.

He takes Gabriel to bed. It was inevitable: he wants this, and so does Gabriel. And though he’s been God for only a short time, he’s lonely. He wants things. Closeness. Both his angel side and his human side alike. And his _divinity_ , if that’s what you want to call it. It all aches for some kind of companionship.

He never got to be close to someone when he lived on earth. Not like this.

And maybe this is a mistake. God isn’t supposed to have favorites, and there’s a power imbalance, after all. _There was always a power imbalance_. But maybe God is allowed to make mistakes. A few, anyway.

Or maybe this isn’t a mistake at all. If it is, he’ll accept the consequences.

They don’t talk a lot; they’re very quiet. They undress, the undoing of their clothes a whisper. Gabriel is nervous and Jack isn’t—something Jack finds remarkable, even though he doesn’t say anything about it. Gabriel has slept with thousands of people, human and non-human alike. He’s slept with porn stars. _Demigods_. Rowena! Jack knows all this, of course, even though he says nothing, not even to tell Gabriel what’s probably obvious—that he’s never done this before.

Afterwards, when their breathing slows a bit, he pulls Gabriel closer to him and tries to still his thoughts. Gabriel has too many thoughts. He’s worried, racked by feelings of unworthiness and self-doubt, certain he’ll ruin this because he ruins everything, and terrified because he loves Jack. Haunted by the realization that Jack simply _is_ love … and there’s no way that Gabriel can ever reciprocate it fully. He’ll fail. Again.

“Stop thinking like that,” Jack says, touching Gabriel’s forehead. “I love you. I will always love you, no matter what. Stop worrying about everything else.”

Gabriel rolls over so that they’re facing one another. “You shouldn’t be here. With me. There are things I’ve—”

“Gabriel. It’s really all right.”

Gabriel sniffles a little, wipes his eyes. Takes a moment to pull himself together. Jack wills him to just breathe.

When he speaks, his voice is warbly. “Yeah, you—you’re right. This is no way to—to act in this kind of—” He clears his throat. “We can find nicer things to talk about. Like you, for instance. How’re things? How’s work? Anything new happen?”

Jack chuckles in the dark.

Gabriel is quiet for a moment. “You’re not going to tell Cas about this, are you? _Shit_. He might kill me. No, wait.” He pauses. “Dean might kill me. Dean is dead, but yeah. He’d still find a way to kill me.”

Jack rolls onto his back. “Gabriel, no offense, but … I really don’t want to talk about my dads. Not right now.”

“Oh. That’s probably—yeah. For the best.” He leans back and laughs quietly.

Jack thinks for a moment, and time seems to stretch. “Honestly? I don’t think Dean would care.”

“What, like maybe he’d buy you a beer and ask you to spare the details?”

No, he wouldn’t do that, either. How to explain this to Gabriel? Even now it’s hard to find the words. To tell his story. He knows what he feels, but expressing himself in ordinary terms—even to an angel—is a little difficult.

But maybe it is time to tell someone how he came to be here, and, aside from Cas, Gabriel is probably the angel who understands him most. Or the one who _tries_ to understand him.

“Dean was my dad,” he begins. “He’ll always be my dad. And … I know he loves me. But Gabriel—I don’t really have a family. I never did. Not in heaven, not on earth. Dean was the one who made me realize that.”

Gabriel tilts his face to look at him.

A bit of time passes before he decides to speak again. “At the end of my life on earth, I was led to believe I had to kill both Chuck and Amara. I was told I had to do this so that people could be free. So that Sam and Dean and Cas … could be free. And I was told that I was the only one who could do this. But there’d be a price for their freedom—I’d die too. I’d have to end my own life in order to end Chuck’s. It was the only way.” He pauses. “I accepted the task. I was fine with it.” He pauses. “Sam and Dean and Cas knew that I had to kill Chuck and Amara. But they didn’t know I would die too. I didn’t tell them. Not until—” He stares into the ceiling above them. “Not until it was almost coming to pass.”

Gabriel continues to stare at Jack. “What happened?”

“I just couldn’t keep the secret anymore. I couldn’t keep lying. I had to tell someone, and I told Cas.”

He doesn’t like to think about that drive, about how upset Cas became, how he could barely keep the car on the road as they drove back to the bunker.

He lets himself think about it right now, how he felt an odd blend of pain and relief. He hated the way he’d hurt Cas. He hated having to hurt him by lying, and hurt him by telling the truth. But he was relieved not to be so alone anymore. He hadn’t minded all that much when he’d been soulless, but once his soul returned, he was anxious and afraid. He felt guilty for keeping such a huge secret.

Every time he tried to tell someone, it was never the right time. Or he’d be stopped by thoughts of Mary. Wasn’t death what he deserved? At least he’d do some good on his way out. 

He begins to talk again. “Cas told Dean, who told Sam. Cas assumed that … that they would see things the way he did, and that everyone would be on the same page. That there was no way Sam and Dean would let me sacrifice my own life. That they’d talk me out of it. And then we’d all look for a better way. Like we always did.” He turns his head to look at Gabriel. “You have to understand that I disagreed with Cas. I was ready to die. I’d made my peace with it, and it felt like the right thing to do. I’d taken Sam and Dean’s mother from them. This seemed like a way to … balance accounts, I guess.”

Gabriel’s brow furrows. He sits up slightly, propped up by his elbow.

“But Cas was wrong. Sam and Dean weren’t on the same page. Sam agreed with Cas that I shouldn’t do it, but Dean didn’t. He didn’t side with Cas. He agreed with my choice—but more than that, he wanted to be free of Chuck. Sam and Dean fought about it. They fought pretty seriously. I mean, the choice was ultimately mine anyway, and I was going to do it regardless. But they still fought.”

He thinks back now, wondering about the coincidences, the chance encounters, the overheard snippets of conversations that set him on this path. How portentous they seemed in retrospect.

“I overheard them,” he tells Gabriel. “I overheard Sam and Dean fighting about … me. Cas wasn’t there. Sam told Dean that it was wrong to let me kill myself for them. That family had always been everything and … you don’t let your family do that kind of thing. And Dean told him that I wasn’t really part of their family.”

Gabriel props himself up further, looking at Jack more intently, if that’s possible.

“He said I wasn’t Sam and I wasn’t Cas. … I just wasn’t. I wasn’t family. And he didn’t mean for me to overhear him … but I overheard him, and he knew I overheard him. And … he didn’t take back what he said. He just said he was sorry that I’d overheard him.”

Now Gabriel sits up and looks down at Jack in the half-dim light. He shakes his head. “He said that? Knowing you were going to sacrifice yourself for them?”

“It was the first honest thing anyone ever said about me during my entire existence.”

He feels Gabriel’s skepticism, his careful reevaluation of the facts as he knows them. “That doesn’t make it right.”

Jack also sits up. “Dean didn’t say anything I didn’t already believe.”

Gabriel just shakes his head and closes his eyes. Like it hurts to keep them open.

“I don’t want you to think—” He stops. It’s difficult to explain this to an angel like Gabriel. It would be less difficult with an angel like Naomi. Or Balthazar. But Gabriel has eons of his own family baggage, plus his centuries of living among humans, of suffering trauma at the hands of those he trusted. He’s more sensitive to this kind of situation, to the emotional slights involved. And therefore less likely to apply a crude moral calculus.

Right now he’s thinking, _I always considered Lucifer family. Despite everything_.

“It wasn’t like _that_ ,” Jack says, acknowledging what Gabriel is thinking. “Dean’s a good person. And I know he feels bad about … all that stuff, now. And actually, it was—it was okay. Dean was honest. Sometimes it’s more important to be kind than honest, but this wasn’t one of those times.” He shrugs. “I killed their mother. You don’t just get over something like that.”

Cas, he remembered, thought differently. But when it came to Dean, Cas saw things through his own lens.

“But what happened to Mary was a mistake.”

“It still happened. Beyond that …it wasn’t just Mary. I didn’t fit. Sam and Dean were brothers. Cas and Dean were in love. I was just … there.”

Gabriel takes his hand. Looks directly into his eyes. “Jack, I’m sorry.”

“I’m not.” He sighs. “It’s what allowed me to leave in the end. When it was all over. I loved my life with them, and I miss it. But it wasn’t really mine. And Dean’s words … oddly enough, they gave me permission to go. To leave Sam and Dean and do this other thing. To not really … have a home.”

Gabriel squeezes his hand. “You have a home.”

“I know. It’s everywhere.”

“You have a home,” Gabriel insists, his tone urgent.

He feels like explaining that he’s an “unnatural presence” that can be everywhere without really belonging anywhere, and that this is what makes him so powerful. But then he understands that Gabriel is saying _don’t leave us. Don’t leave me_.

Gabriel reaches for him. He clasps him in a tight hug and begins to sob noiselessly into his shoulder. Jack hugs him back. He’s not planning on going anywhere, but he knows he might not always be here. Thanks to Chuck, he understands that God doesn’t last forever. And everyone else knows the same thing—all the angels and the demons and the human souls. So while Jack can try his best to stay, he can’t promise the eternal.

*

In his first days of being God, Jack didn’t have time to focus on the details. He had to think about the big picture. As Amara unfurled within him, they journeyed to the farthest galaxies to achieve parity with creation. Jack saw all time and space and felt himself stretching to encompass them.

Then he started the hard work of looking for Cas. Looking for the Empty. Chuck and Billie had been moving angels and demons in and out of the Empty at will, but Jack couldn’t even _find it_.

On the fifth day of searching he decided he needed a break. He came back to earth to clear his head and regroup, watched a sunset in Dubai and then felt himself longing for home. _Homesick_. He let himself remember Kansas, with its flat and sunlit landscape. Kansas was where he came from.

A second later, he touched down in the bunker.

For the first time since everything, he let himself remember all the things that had happened to him there. His confusing first days. Dean promising to kill him if it came to that. Sam pressuring him to move that stupid pencil. Seeing the video of his mother. The day Cas walked through the door.

 _Cas_.

Cas had given his life for him, and then he’d given it for Dean. Jack let himself remember the morning, just days earlier, when Dean showed up in Minnesota. Alone. Without Cas. “Where’s Cas?” Jack asked. As soon as the words left his mouth, he was dreading the answer. 

He was furious, too. Furious it took a question to pull it out of Dean.

“Cas is gone,” Dean said, like it was just another lost case. And maybe it was—they were standing in a world without people. Without birds and elephants and treefrogs.

Jack couldn’t begin to measure his loss.

Once he and Sam heard from Dean, Jack had just assumed Cas was with Dean. It had never occurred to him—never ever—that Dean would return without Cas. That he would have lost Cas. That he would have lost Cas _and not said anything about it_.

He was appalled. Horrified. And then, angry. So angry. 

Dean couldn’t look him in the face. “Jack, I’m sorry,” he said before walking away.

Jack didn’t have the presence of mind to say anything. Not in that moment, and not for hours afterward. But what would he have said? _You’re sorry? You lost my father—the only father who wanted me, who loved me unconditionally, who didn’t try to kill me or put me in a box—and you’re telling me you’re sorry?_

 _A few days ago, you told me I wasn’t family, and then you lost the only family I had. You let my father sacrifice himself. For you. And now you say you’re sorry_.

He didn’t have the wherewithal to articulate any of that, nor to reveal what he knew to be true—that Cas didn’t just “summon” the Empty. A deal had been made. A line had been crossed. Cas had allowed himself to experience true happiness, and that happiness was Dean.

The thought was horrifying—not for the choice Cas had made but for everything it implied. _You didn’t deserve him_ , Jack would think later. _All he ever wanted to do was make you happy, and you made him miserable. And because of you, he’s dead._

That first night after Cas’s death was the worst.

Jack didn’t sleep. He didn’t sleep that much anyway—but in the past he’d always been able to count on Cas, who didn’t sleep either. Sometimes they’d watch Netflix together in the bunker, or just talk. Cas wasn’t just his father. He was also his best friend.

He was dead. And Dean didn’t say anything about it, didn’t talk about Cas. Didn’t try to comfort Jack, not even superficially. He just drank, as usual. And didn’t offer Jack the closure of telling him how his father really died.

By the time Jack defeated Chuck and left earth, he was no longer angry like that—Chuck took so much energy. And once things had cooled, he could see that Dean was indeed devastated about Cas. And sorry for everything else.

Jack could never stay angry at anyone anyway.

But it wasn’t until he touched back down in the bunker days later that he could feel the shape and heaviness of Dean’s grief. It hung in the air in and around the bunker; it was almost visible, alive. All at once he could see everything Dean did during the day and night. In the daytime he acted normal—belligerent, combative, irreverent. But at night he ached, reliving those last moments with Cas in the dungeon. Jack could see all that now. He knew what Cas had said and how he’d felt—unburdened and happy for the first time in eons, fully at peace with his choice—and how Dean had wept afterwards. How he’d sprawled on the floor and sobbed. How he’d staggered into the bathroom to vomit.

How he’d taken hours to pull himself together. That’s why it took him so long to return Sam’s calls and texts.

Jack knew that Dean missed him, too. He didn’t have to see his name carved into the table to feel that, to know that Dean had regrets. Not just about things he’d said and done, but about opportunities he felt he’d wasted, things they never got to share. Even stupid things. Sporting events. Concerts. Hell, just talking more. _You were my kid and I just let you go_.

Jack could tell that Dean wanted to pray to him but wouldn’t allow himself to do so, feeling he didn’t deserve Jack’s time.

Finally, though, he just broke down and let himself ask. “I need you to find him, okay? I don’t need to see him again. I just need him to be all right.”

It was all Jack needed, too.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> One thing that has haunted me about season 15 is Dean's assertion that "Jack's not family." I decided to explore how Jack might have experienced that conversation.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A near-tragedy brings Jack back in touch with Sam; Sam reflects on the tumultuous life he shared with Dean and Cas; Dean wonders if Cas should take a larger role in angel matters.

Jack’s on his way back from seeing Dean when runs into Gabriel on the steps. (He can fly and zap himself where he wants to go, but sometimes he enjoys the journey for its own sake.)

“You make house calls now?” Gabriel says.

“Just on my way back from Dean and Cas’s place.”

They meet on the same step. “Trouble in paradise moment?” Gabriel asks.

“Nothing like that.” Jack laughs at the thought. “Dean just had a question.”

“Glad to hear,” Gabriel says.

A trouble in paradise moment—or TIP—is angel shorthand for the kind of squabbling soulmate couples do in heaven. It’s never anything serious, but some angels are fascinated that human souls, even in heaven, can generate conflict. So many emotions! Such drama! Most of the ordinary angels couldn’t care less, but the cherubim are especially taken with the phenomenon, peeking in on these outbursts the way some people stream cat videos. (Jack thinks he should tell the cherubim to knock it off. They mean well, but they don’t get personal boundaries.)

But Dean and Cas don’t have those moments. Not _like that_. That surprises Jack, though maybe it shouldn’t—they bickered enough on earth to last them well into the great beyond.

They’re also technically not “soulmates,” as only one of them is a human soul, but Jack doesn’t know how else to describe them. That morning, Dean gave him a warm hug and then pointed at Miracle, who was sniffing around the garden he and Cas tended to. “Look who made it over the ‘rainbow bridge,’” Dean said. “Have you two officially met? Here.” Dean called Miracle over, who was so excited to meet Jack that he almost leapt into his arms.

Now Gabriel asks him if he’s going to be in his office.

“I am.” He smiles.

“Good. Because it’s boring without you.”

They slept together just one time, but now they’re good friends, and Jack is glad—he needed a friend more than anything else. Gabriel seems okay too—more relaxed, less needy. And though angels are a bunch of chatty-Cathys, Gabriel isn’t a talker. 

Still, Jack’s loneliness has only deepened. Being with Gabriel just reminded him of how alone he really is and of the distance that separates him from everyone else, even the angels. _Especially_ the angels. As much as Gabriel “gets him,” he still isn’t like him. And for as long as Gabriel lived in the human world, he can’t know what it’s like to actually _be_ human. To be a hybrid being who’s both extremely young and impossibly old.

Jack knows things that no one else can know. Or feel. He now understands how loneliness probably drove Chuck to create the first archangels in the first place, and how he might have felt afterwards—like nothing had really changed for him. Time and space were still vastly complicated and strangely sterile.

Maybe this is what drove him crazy. He wanted to have it all while simultaneously being it all. Jack hopes Chuck’s decline isn’t a forecast for his own.

“I’ll see you in a few,” Gabriel starts to say while continuing down the stairs, but Jack feels something deep in his mind and grabs Gabriel by the wrist.

“Wait,” he says.

Gabriel turns back.

Jack looks at him. “It’s Sam.”

*

Jack and Gabriel touch down in Seattle Children’s and head immediately to the emergency room, which is teeming with children and families and nurses and staff and emotion. Too much emotion. As if drawn by an invisible string, Jack knows just where to find Sam: leaning against the wall in a corner, fidgeting, too nervous to sit down because his son is back there undergoing X-rays and CT scans and other tests. He just wants to be with him, but he can’t. Too many people are currently in the emergency room.

 _Oh, Sam_ , Jack thinks. It takes everything in his power to not do what he wants, which is to manifest physically so he can walk over to Sam and throw his arms around him.

He turns to find Gabriel. “His son was hit by a car. It’s not very bad, but I’m going to go see for myself. … Gabriel?”

Gabriel looks up at him, startled. Jack hadn’t noticed: with all the emotion around them, Gabriel’s mood plummeted. Like a lot of the other angels, Gabriel hasn’t been making regular trips to earth or receiving prayers; all this human pain is overwhelming to an angel who’s been out of commission.

He grabs Gabriel’s hand. “You want to leave?”

Gabriel squeezes back, trying to reassure Jack and himself. “I’m fine.”

“Do you want to come with me? Or can you stay with Sam while I go back there?”

Gabriel looks at Sam, seeming more resolved. “I’ll stay.” _He watched over me once_ , Gabriel thinks, and right away Jack can see the memory of the bunker, of Gabriel’s confusing first hours hiding in Sam’s bedroom. Gabriel releases his hand and goes over to stand next to Sam. He nods at Jack. _I’ll be okay_.

Jack goes to find the child. Dean. He’s already finished with the scans and asleep in a makeshift exam room. They’ll be moving him to his own hospital room shortly and keeping him for observation. He was hit by a car that morning while crossing the street on his way to school. The driver was temporarily blinded by the morning sun, didn’t see him. He’ll be okay—Jack knows this immediately. He has a broken arm and a mild concussion but is otherwise fine.

He’s nine years old.

He just started fourth grade this year. His favorite color is green. His favorite food is pineapple. He likes most of his classes in school and has a best friend named Ryan. And he’s a headstrong, independent child. It’s how he got Sam to let him to walk to school by himself, even though kids technically aren’t supposed to walk alone until they’re ten.

(Sam is blaming himself right now, catastrophizing in the waiting room, wondering how he could let this happen. How he could stop the apocalypse and survive the cage and defeat Chuck and then let his son get hit by a car, he’ll never understand. It’s something his father would find unforgivable. It’s something his brother would find unforgivable. He’s thinking about how his brother at age nine kept him safe from monsters much worse than cars. _Stop_ , Jack wants to say. _The morning sun isn’t your fault. A distracted motorist isn’t your fault_.)

Jack extends a hand over Dean’s head. It’s all right. He’ll be all right.

He returns to the waiting room. “He’s fine,” he tells Gabriel.

Gabriel nods at Sam, who’s sitting feet away. He finally decided to sit. He holds his head between his hands. “He’s not.”

“I know.”

“He’s been through a lot.” Gabriel turns to him. “Why don’t I stay here. You can go back.”

“I’ll stay.” Jack takes a step toward Sam.

“Okay, but—Jack.” Gabriel touches his upper arm. “If this hits angel radio—and I’m not saying it will, but if it does—Cas will know. And I don’t know if he should find out that way.”

Jack agrees. “Go back and tell him. Make sure he knows the injuries aren’t serious, and that _I’m_ here with Sam.” Cas will probably try to come anyway. “Make sure Dean isn’t within earshot when you tell him.”

The question of whether to tell Dean is another matter. Dean _really_ can’t do anything. But it’s a decision Jack will leave to Cas.

Right after Gabriel leaves, a doctor comes to update Sam on his son’s condition and lets him go back to see him as they wait to move him into an overnight room. Jack hopes this will calm Sam—and it does to a certain extent—but as soon as he’s assured his son will be okay, he begins to reproach himself again. How inattentive he’s been, lately. How distracted.

Jack can see all these distractions. He can see into Sam’s mind and feel what he’s feeling.

Sam’s currently in the process of getting a divorce. It hasn’t been especially acrimonious—at least as compared to what Sam’s read on the internet. He’s been able to keep shared custody of Dean, but now he wonders if that’s really a good thing, since he can’t manage to keep the kid safe when he’s just walking to school.

Reunited with a sleeping Dean behind a thin curtain that separates them from the rest of the emergency room, Sam allows himself a few minutes to just _feel_. To feel relief that his son is okay, and to feel grateful that things didn’t take a different path.

And since Dean is still unconscious, Sam lets himself cry. He leans against the wall and wraps his arms around himself. He’s not a good father, he thinks. He wasn’t meant to be a father. His brother knew. Early on, instinctively, Dean understood that Winchester men should not be fathers. It undoubtedly colored the way he handled Jack.

 _Jack_. Sam lets himself remember. In the years before he got his son, he never knew how to answer the question _do you have any kids_? No, he didn’t have children. But why did it feel so terrible to say that?

He hasn’t been honest with anyone for the past decade.

After Dean died, Sam eventually left the bunker but carried on hunting for a little while. He moved to the West Coast and gravitated to Portland—a place Dean would have hated, and probably for good reason. Over the years Sam came to accept Dean’s perspective that the people on the coasts were douchey, and that living in Silicon Valley or the Pacific Northwest wasn’t a life goal any self-respecting Midwesterner should have.

But Portland might have suited Dean—it was the kind of city where you didn’t need a lot to get by. Sam lived in a basement apartment and tended bar while he hunted on the side. Nevertheless, hunting was slow. Ever since Jack became God, the monsters hadn’t been as plentiful. Or as strong. So he changed his priorities, transferred his Stanford credits to Portland State, and decided to finish college.

He could have studied anything—ancient languages, computer engineering, chemistry—but he chose social work. He figured it was a field where an ex-hunter might contribute something, armed with knowledge that a lot of people didn’t have. For instance, he knew that a lot of the worst examples of human behavior might not be the result of “human behavior” at all. Or that fucked-up families didn’t always get that way because a dad had a drinking problem or a mom left home.

But his thesis that fell apart pretty quickly. The vast majority of human dysfunction was, well, _human_. You couldn’t blame the supernatural for more than 98% of it. So then his personal story shifted a bit. He told himself he just wanted to help people. Then he started telling himself he wanted to help people _manage their emotions_.

He stayed in school, got his MSW, met his wife through work, and moved to Seattle, where he worked for the county before joining a private practice. His wife wanted children. He was ambivalent (he still ached for Jack), but he agreed as long as they could adopt. About this, his “official explanation” was a family history of various mental illnesses and physical disorders and premature deaths. That was almost true, if you counted “being Winchester” as a disorder. But ever since he’d discovered that he was part of some mystical, fetishized bloodline, and that his parents had been fixed up by heaven so that they could produce the “perfect vessels” for Lucifer and Michael, he knew for sure that he didn’t want biological kids. Even with Jack running the universe, Sam was still too scared to take any chances.

So they adopted Dean in their second year of marriage, and Sam wasn’t surprised by how much he loved him. He knew he would, just as he’d loved Jack. But what _did_ surprise him was how much like a Winchester he seemed. When his wife wasn’t around, he’d take out old pictures of his brother, just to look. The resemblance was unsettling.

He spent so much time thinking about this—and missing Dean and Jack and Cas and everyone else—that it was no mystery things didn’t work out with Molly. He really should have told her everything, but he believed he was protecting her. Still, she was a good person who deserved better. Eventually she agreed. She left him. Now she’s engaged to someone else.

He did _try_ to tell her a few times. He’d even set aside a couple of different occasions. But he never knew how to begin. How do you tell someone that you killed monsters? Do you bring it up over dinner? “For fifteen years I helped my brother kill demons and stop the apocalypse. Later on, we lived in a magical bunker with an angel and a half-angel kid. The kid turned out to be God. My brother fell in love with the angel and couldn’t live without him. So when the angel died, my brother died too. I told you he was killed in a hunting accident, and that was basically true … but we were hunting vampires, not deer. … Do you want dessert?”

And, okay, part of him was selfish: he knew this was irrational, but he felt that if he let someone else in, if he told his stories about Dean and Jack and Cas … then they wouldn’t be _his_ anymore.

Above all, he knew if he told her, she’d know the truth: that those years hunting things and saving people had been the best in his life. Nothing compared to them. Sure, those years were also miserable. Fighting, dying, losing everyone he’d ever loved—how could that be anyone’s definition of happy?

But nothing in normal life came close.

Not exactly a healthy outlook. He used to lecture Dean about burying his trauma. Now he’d invented a version of himself even Dean wouldn’t recognize.

Sam wishes he’d been more upfront with Dean all those years ago. After they got Cas back that last time, Sam thought for sure he and Dean would stop dancing around each other and start using their words. Cas had been taken from them several times, but the time Lucifer killed him was the worst. It seemed so permanent that Dean didn’t even try to bring him back. Instead, he tried to off _himself_. He’d deny that’s what he was trying to do (just had to stop his heart for a case, that was all!)—but Sam knew better.

When Cas came back from the dead that time, it was like he fell out of the sky for them. For _Dean_. “We got Cas back,” Dean kept saying. Ecstatic. “We did,” Sam replied, and thought about saying, _I’m happy for you, but please. Please make sure your door is closed, and try not to be too loud._

Except it never came to that.

A few times Sam thought it did. Or was going to. For instance: the time he stumbled upon them in the TV room, the morning after movie night, curled up together, asleep. They’d been watching some old Western, a dumb movie you’d tolerate only for a person you loved, and Dean was sagging against Cas, his head on his shoulder. Cas had his arms around him, and he’d evidently gotten a blanket and draped it over Dean. Cas didn’t sleep that often, but he was sleeping right then—or at least pretending to sleep.

It seemed to Sam that things were moving in a certain direction. But he’d often thought that, over the years. Then Dean would do something shitty again.

Like Valentine’s Day. A couple weeks after Sam saw them on the couch together, Dean decided to celebrate Valentine’s Day in his usual way—by going out and getting laid. The fact that Cas had come back from the dead didn’t change his plans. He rolled out of the bunker in his best “I’m getting laid tonight” outfit—a notch above his usual grunge—and left Cas and Jack playing checkers in the kitchen. Sam could tell Cas was hurt, even if he pretended not to be. He knew he had no real claim to Dean and therefore no reason to be upset, but he was still hurt.

Sam almost said something to Dean about it afterwards.

By the time the next Valentine’s Day rolled around, Cas was permanently dead, having traded his life for Jack’s, and then Dean’s. All the same, Dean put on clean clothes and slapped on some cologne and went out. Joylessly. As though it were a grim duty. He was back before ten. Sam found him on the couch watching TV, Miracle by his side.

“That was quick,” Sam said.

Dean didn’t look up from the TV. “It was.”

He had his “game face” on. This is what Sam called it—the “we need to enjoy life because if we don’t Cas’s and Jack’s sacrifice won’t mean anything” face. It was a stupid mentality that turned having fun into a moral obligation, and Sam felt like saying that.

But Sam also felt terrible. He wished he’d done more for Dean and Cas.

As he watched Dean watch the cooking channel and drink beer, he understood that he too had wasted time. He wished he’d done more over the years than drop subtle hints. _Go easy on Cas. It’s Cas. You know his heart is always in the right place. And … he really cares about you, Dean_. 

But those two didn’t do hints. You had to spell things out for them. Cas needed to be told that Dean loved him back, and Dean needed to be told that falling in love with a guy wasn’t the worst thing that could happen. That it was okay to be into guys. _There are worse things, Dean_. Sam wished he’d just said that at some point.

He should have just said a lot of things: _I know how you feel about each other. How? Because I’ve been living under the same roof with you guys for the past four years. It’s fucking obvious. When all the other angels and demons make jokes about you two? They’re not talking out of their asses. Not completely_.

Dean and Cas’s relationship wasn’t his responsibility. Nor was it his place to step in. All the same, he wished he’d done so.

He thought about the time Cas left. _For weeks_. “He said his powers are failing and he has nothing to offer anymore,” Dean explained.

“And you let him leave like that? Jesus fuck, Dean.”

“He fucked up, Sam. He screwed the pooch on Bel.”

“So? I can’t believe you just let him walk out of the bunker.” He looked down and shook his head. They were standing in the reading room.

“What, was I supposed to run after him?”

“Yes!”

“I’m not gonna beg him to come back, Sam.”

“Dean, it’s Cas!”

“You think I don’t know that? And that it doesn’t kill me?”

“Apparently not, since we’re standing here fighting about it!” 

“You’re the one who’s shouting!” Dean said. He exhaled and took a swig of whiskey.

Sam willed himself to breathe regularly and decided to try harder to make Dean see his point of view. “Dean. Jack just died … _again._ … You know how much he meant to Cas. How else did you expect Cas to react? To handle Belphegor? The fact that he held it together at all … Just, try to see things from his perspective. For once in your goddamn life.”

“Cas had one job and he didn’t do it. And because he didn’t do it, Rowena’s dead, and you’re …” He gestured to Sam. “You’re a mess.”

“Don’t make this about me. This is about you hanging your best friend out to dry. _Again_.”

Dean flinched, almost imperceptibly. Then he recovered. “Cas chose to leave. Cas _made choices_ , Sam. And lately he’s made a lot of shitty choices.” He shook his head. When he started talking again, his voice was a bit softer. “When he goes off on his own, when he falls off the grid … he gets into trouble. And he knows this, too. We’ve been _through this_ with him. I mean, for fuck’s sake, it’s how all this happened in the first place.”

“What are you talking about? How all _what_ happened?”

“What do you think I’m talking about?” His voice picked up an edge again. “I’m talking about what set this whole thing in motion. If he’d stuck to the goddamn plan two years ago—”

“Stop.” Sam’s voice came out a hoarse whisper.

“Mom would still be alive, at least.” Dean pulled a chair back from the table and sat down. “Kid wouldn’t have been there to rip a hole in reality. And Michael—”

“ _Stop_.” Sam closed his eyes. He couldn’t look at Dean anymore.

“I’m not saying anything you haven’t thought about.”

Sam’s eyes flew open. “That’s where you’re wrong, Dean. You’re _wrong_. Not everyone thinks like that. I don’t think like that. Cas doesn’t think like that. We don’t sit around second-guessing whether someone should exist.” He shook his head. “Chuck does that well enough for all of us, with the different worlds he creates.”

“Good for you,” Dean said, but his voice didn’t sound as nonchalant as he meant it to sound. Instead he sounded defeated and defensive. 

Sam just shook his head and looked down. “Would it kill you, Dean? Would it kill you to admit the kid meant something to you?”

“Yeah, he meant something, okay. But that doesn’t change things.” He looked into his glass, which was almost empty, and lowered his voice. “It doesn’t change what happened to Mom.”

“Christ, you think I’m saying that? But Dean, he didn’t have a soul. And he didn’t have a soul because he burned it off trying to save _us_. Don’t you remember what he was like _before_ all that? The kid didn’t have a mean bone in his body. All he ever wanted to do was the right thing. Cas tried telling us that.”

“Yeah, Cas was always really forthcoming with information about Jack.”

Sam looked away, wanting to end the conversation already. He went into the other room and tried texting Cas again.

In the months after Cas died, but before Dean died, Sam wished he hadn’t just walked away from that conversation. He wished he’d forced the issue. He wished he’d said: _Cas loved Jack more than anything, but right now you’re all he has. Whatever happens—Cas would never leave you if you asked him to stay. You know that, right? You have to know that. So get on the phone and tell him to come him back._

Now, in the hospital, waiting for his son to be moved into another room, Sam thinks about Dean and Cas. He hopes they’re together and happy. He wonders what happiness looks like for them. He wonders what happiness is.

*

Jack can feel all this as Sam feels it; he can remember what Sam remembers. He can feel the secret longings that Sam keeps with him every day as he dotes on Dean and tries to seem content and stable and satisfied with his life.

“Oh, Sam,” Jack says as he watches Sam move a chair so he can sit next to Dean’s bed. They’ve now been moved into the room where Dean will spend the night. Sam, Jack knows, will stay for the entire night, sitting in that chair. He won’t leave. He won’t even leave to get a sandwich. What if Dean wakes up when he’s not there?

Jack wishes that Sam’s life had been better. Easier. He wishes Sam had stayed with Eileen. She was the one who was right for him; they had a natural bond. But they split around the time Dean died. Sam’s grief, Jack knows, was just too great, one loss stacked upon another upon another. In the space of a year, he lost his entire family.

He wishes he could send Eileen back to Sam. He thinks maybe he should. Maybe he should find a way.

“I wish I could give you back everything you lost,” Jack says, and he wonders why Sam never prays to him. Even in moments like this one. Does he think he doesn’t deserve to be listened to?

He hears the tell-tale ruffle of wings and looks up to see both Gabriel and Cas right outside the door. _Of course Cas came_ , Jack thinks.

“Sorry,” Gabriel says when he sees him. His face lights up, though, which tells Jack that he’s really not sorry. “I couldn’t convince him to stay in his love shack.”

“Jack,” Cas says, walking toward Jack. He looks down at Sam’s son as he lies in bed. “What happened?”

“Car accident. He’ll be fine.”

Despite this assurance, Cas looks stricken. “Did you heal him?”

“I would have if he’d needed it. But … he didn’t.” (Jack promised not to intervene, but he would have made an exception for Sam’s son.)

Cas studies Sam. Sam, who’s sitting by the boy’s bedside, leaning forward with his elbows propped on his knees. He turns back to Jack. “Dean doesn’t know I’m here.”

“I was able to smuggle him off the reservation,” Gabriel says to Jack. “It was hard, but worth the effort.” He’s trying to be funny, but Jack can tell he’s still nervous, keyed up by all this human emotion.

Cas, on the other hand, seems okay. Despite the fact that he was pretty messed up from the Empty, he’s made a fuller and faster recovery than a lot of the other angels, probably because he lived with Dean all those years—a simmering pot of human volatility. And even in heaven, Dean continues to have a lot of emotions. Cas has built up a tolerance.

That morning, when Jack visited Dean, Cas was running an errand. It occurred to Jack that Dean planned for this time because he wanted to speak to Jack alone. “He said he needed to borrow a book from Alfie,” Dean said.

 _Alfie_? Oh, Samandriel, right.

Dean met with Jack in a small garden close to their house, which Cas often tends to. And because Cas likes to tend to it, Dean spends a lot of time there. Sometimes he even gets roped into helping Cas with the upkeep, though he usually complains that gardening seems to defeat the purpose of heaven because it’s dirty and time-consuming. Cas tells him some people like dirty and time-consuming, even in heaven, and that for him gardening is therapeutic. “That sounds like you,” Dean says. “Into self-punishment.” And Cas says, “Well, you’re not required to help, Dean,” but Dean follows him around anyway, filling in topsoil. He’s not going to let Cas do _all_ the work by himself.

They do this a lot, it seems. They enjoy pushing each other’s buttons.

With Dean in the garden that morning, Jack could detect a slight hint of tension in the air. Dean and Cas don’t have those TIP moments—not ones that make angel radio, anyway—but they’ve obviously been at odds about _something_ , something outside the realm of their ordinary give-and-take. They’re so used to each other that each one knows what to expect from the other: Dean will be somewhat cantankerous in the morning and slightly bossy in the afternoon. And Cas will be slightly passive aggressive in the face of cantankerousness and resistant to bossiness. But at night, it’s Cas who leads Dean into the bedroom and holds him and says things like _I’ve got you_ and _I’m not going anywhere, don’t worry_. And Dean just folds under Cas’s touch and becomes the person he secretly always wanted to be.

But Jack knows: it’s the idea that Cas might go somewhere—or that he might not—that worries Dean, and Jack could sense this conflict when he visited with Dean that morning. After he visited with Miracle and let Dean show him the garden—again—Jack asked what was up.

“You sure you don’t want a beer?” Dean said.

“Thanks, Dean, but I’m sure.”

“Can you believe this place?” Dean said, gesturing to the scene around them. “Well, you probably can, since you’re the one who created it.”

Jack just smiled. He thought about correcting Dean, telling him, once again, that he didn’t do much—human imagination and angel energy are what power heaven—but Dean knows this. Still, he always wants to let Jack know how much he appreciates things. And Jack understands. On earth, their relationship was complicated. Rocky, even. Dean still feels bad about things, revisits things in his mind that he wishes he’d done differently, things he wishes he’d said (or _not_ said).

“Things going okay for you?” Dean asked him that morning. They sat down on the bench together and Dean gave him a beer anyway, even though he’d turned it down.

“Of course, Dean. All is well.”

“Angels aren’t giving you a hard time?” He twisted the cap off his own beer. “I mean, don’t get me wrong, I’m not questioning your ability to handle them. I _know_ you’re handling things, and that things are fucking great. But it’s just … I know it’s gotta be hectic.”

Jack just smiled, studying Dean. “Dean, what’s wrong? What’s on your mind?”

Dean sighed. “Guess I’m not much of a poker player. Not with God, anyway.” He took a swig of beer.

Jack just waited for Dean to get his bearings.

“I know things are going on with the angels,” Dean said. “Various taskforces. Missions. I know they have work to do.” He glances at Jack. “I understand that … maybe you need him. For, you know. Things.”

Jack blinked. “You think I’m going to pull Cas back into rotation.”

Dean shrugged. “He’s on your A-team, right?”

“Dean, I don’t make angels serve if they don’t want to serve. Trust me, no one wants an army that’s been drafted. They have free will now. And Cas—Cas isn’t required to do anything he doesn’t want to do.”

But Jack knew immediately that this answer didn’t comfort Dean. He winced a bit, and Jack understood: Dean was worried about what Cas _wanted_.

 _He thinks he’s not enough_ , Jack thought.

“You think Cas _wants_ to serve,” Jack said.

Dean looked away. “I want Cas to be Cas, whatever that means to him. He’s a good angel. And from what I’ve heard from other angels, maybe a little too good. Maybe indispensable. I don’t want to take him away from what he really wants or needs to be doing.”

“You think you’re doing that.”

Dean just shrugged and took another swig. “I’m dead and he’s still alive.”

Jack sighed. “Dean, you’re not dead. You’re just … differently alive now. The human soul is one of the most powerful forces in existence.”

“Sure. But there are places I can’t go, and things I can’t do. For Cas … it’s different.”

Jack knew that Dean and Cas had already been having this conversation, and that Cas tried to convince Dean that he doesn’t need anything else to be happy and that he’s not going anywhere. And Dean thinks he’s keeping Cas away from his true purpose, and from the rest of his angel family, “flying monkeys” though they may be. And Cas just wishes Dean would believe him when he says he doesn’t need anything more.

“Dean,” Jack began.

“Sorry, Jack,” Dean said, cutting him off. “I shouldn’t be laying this on you. I mean, hell, it’s not your problem. And it’s not on you to … intervene that way. It’s our thing. I know. And … I already ask too much of you.”

“It’s what I’m here for, Dean.”

Dean just glanced at him, and suddenly he looked very sad. “Don’t work so hard, Jack,” he said. But on the inside, he thinks, _I just wish you’d gotten to be a kid_.

*

Gabriel leaves—he says he has work to do “upstairs,” but Jack knows that the hospital is getting to him—but Cas and Jack hold vigil for a while longer. Sam’s son wakes up and complains he’s hungry, and Sam’s so relieved he tells Dean he can have whatever he wants without even really thinking if that’s a good thing at this point.

“You should get back now,” Jack tells Cas.

“What about you?”

“I’ll stay a little longer. Just to be sure.”

Cas smiles ruefully. “You miss him.” He glances back at Sam.

 _I miss all of you,_ Jack wants to say. _I still miss the way things were_. Instead he says, “You do, too.”

“It’s much longer for them than it is for us.”

Jack nods. “That knowledge makes it only slightly easier.”

“I should get back to Dean. If I’m gone any longer, he’ll know something’s going on.”

“Are you going to tell him about this?”

Cas thinks for a moment and then shakes his head. “Maybe. But I’m not sure this would do him any good. He’d worry.” He looks directly at Jack. “He worries about you, you know. He thinks you work too hard.”

After he’s gone, Jack turns his attention back to Sam and his son, resolving to stay with them for just a few more hours.


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Cas and Dean discuss plans; Sam struggles with how much to tell his son about the past; Jack makes an unwelcome discovery.

There are all kinds of beginnings.

Dean’s more sentimental than he lets on, so he likes to think about beginnings—of the first time he knew he loved Cas and the first time Cas knew he loved him. He lets _only_ Cas know him like this—happy and vulnerable and musing while he lies in Cas’s arms.

This is Dean at his most private, his most unguarded. He’d die— _again_ —if anyone else saw him like this: so sappy and feeling and sentimental.

Occasionally he runs his hypotheses by Cas—his guesses about when precisely they fell in love with each other. The particulars of their genesis. 

“Oh no, I definitely didn’t fall in love with you the moment I pulled you out of hell,” Cas tells him, laughing softly. They’re both in bed. Awake, tangled together. They had a fight before—a fight that ended the way most of their fights end—with make-up sex. Now Cas just holds him.

“No?”

“No offense, Dean Winchester, but you were just a job then. A dangerous and fascinating job, but a job nonetheless. I was more concerned with getting my soldiers out alive.”

Dean looks at him. “And here I thought the very touch of me corrupted you.” 

Cas traces Dean’s arm, his elbow. Smiles. “About that. Angels can be melodramatic. But … yes. I did find you somewhat riveting. Even as I was pulling you out of hell.”

Dean smirks to himself. He likes asking Cas when he knew—like _really knew_ —because he knows Cas will come up with a different answer every time. It never fails. It seems that there are multiple origin points here, possibilities within possibilities. Cas might say something like, _When you kissed Anna in front of me_. (“Yeah, that was kind of a dick move,” Dean admits. “I saw your face. I thought you were into _her_ , though. Not me.”) Or _when you took me to that brothel_. (“Really?” Dean says. “The prospect of banging a girl named Chastity turned you onto _me_?” And Cas says, “Well, not really. I realized I just wanted to spend my last night on earth in your company, Dean. I didn’t understand why you needed to complicate things by involving a woman.” And Dean says, “Let me get this straight. You wanted to spend your last night on earth … banging me instead.” And Cas laughs and says, “No. I wanted to spend my last night on earth just being with you. I enjoyed our talks. But if I’d known more about sex back then … then yes, Dean. I would have wanted to spend my last night banging you. Banging your brains out, as you would put it.” At this Dean just laughs.)

This time, the moment that Cas settles on—the moment that breaks Dean’s heart a little—is the time Dean forgave him for Sam. “He was the most important person in your life, and I hurt him. I hurt him so awfully, Dean. It was unforgivable, what I did. And still you took me back.”

“Of course I took you back, dumbass,” Dean says casually, wanting to push aside the unpleasant memory.

“I didn’t deserve it. I really didn’t.” He cups Dean’s face. “Not many people would have. If you’d never spoken to me again, I wouldn’t have blamed you. That would have been a perfectly normal human reaction.”

Dean closes his eyes. He doesn’t want to imagine a life where he’d never again spoken to Cas.

“But instead you opened your heart to me. Again. And I loved you for it. From that point on, I resolved never to leave you, as long as I was alive.”

Laying his head on Cas’s chest, Dean keeps his eyes squeezed shut.

“When I said you were the most selfless, loving human being I’d ever met, I wasn’t wrong. You forgave the unforgivable. You’re a good person, Dean. I just … wish you’d accept that.”

This is something he still can’t accept about himself, and Cas knows this. “Cas. Don’t.”

“Don’t what, Dean? Tell you the truth? Sorry, I can’t make you that promise. I’ll always be here to tell you the truth about yourself. How much you changed me. How fundamentally good and giving you are.”

And now the moment has turned. Why does Cas always have to do this?

“Cas, can we not?” he says.

He hates remembering the things Cas said to him right before he died—mostly because he hates to think about Cas’s death. Just remembering Cas’s last moments, his last words to Dean, how gingerly he’d closed the space between them and said _I know how you see yourself,_ and his eyes were wet and his face was different in a way Dean had never seen, like _holy shit, who is this person_ , and Dean didn’t want to contemplate what was going to happen next because he knew it would be pivotal and huge and that things would never be the same again—and how Cas got taken by the Empty while Dean watched—is enough to jumpstart a panic attack, even in heaven. It’s a bad memory. Maybe his worst memory, which is saying a lot. His life wasn’t exactly a collection of Kodak moments _before_ Cas died.

More importantly, Cas is just flat-out wrong about his personality. If someone said they fell in love with him because he’s loyal and forthcoming and occasionally funny—or drop-dead gorgeous (not to brag, but he got that compliment a lot on earth)—that would be one thing. That would be something Dean could accept.

But selfless and loving? _Him_? It’s like Cas fell in love with a version of Dean that didn’t exist. And this baffles Dean, makes him nervous.

“I think we need to talk, Dean,” Cas says. 

_We need to talk_. Those dreaded words. Dean didn’t take them well in life—not from Sam or any friend or romantic partner—and he doesn’t think he’ll cope much better in death.

Cas says, “It’s what we keep fighting about.”

Dean pushes himself off Cas and lies back so he’s looking at the ceiling. “No, Cas. It’s not what we’re fighting about.”

“It is indirectly.”

Dean just drapes his forearm across his face.

“You think you’re being selfish for wanting me to be here with you. Instead of being somewhere else, with the other angels, doing angelic things. Because again, you think of everyone else’s needs rather than your own. But I’m still an angel, Dean. I simply _am_. And right now my particular purpose is to be with you. For as long as you’ll have me.”

 _Oh, is that so?_ Dean feels like saying. _Then go be someone else’s angel_. But he won’t say this. To be so would be mean. And also dishonest. Dean doesn’t know what he’d do without Cas. He remembers the morning he went to Charlie’s place ( _last day of Cas’s life—how could he have known, how he would have done things differently if he had_ ) and she was so distraught about losing Stevie. _I said I wasn’t gonna do this again_ , she said, _the love thing_ , and later that night, her words would haunt Dean, but for him they’d become something different: _No one should do this at all. No one should love anybody. Cas, buddy, what were you thinking?_

Why he didn’t throw himself on top of Cas in those last seconds and let the Empty take him too, he’ll never understand. That night he hoped to die in his sleep, and kept feeling that way every night for several weeks thereafter. In the morning he’d wake up—late and often hungover—and he’d feel okay for a split second, but then he’d remember. Oh, that’s right, still alive.

_I wasn’t worth it._

“Dean—”

Dean doesn’t move his arm, but he feels Cas shift beside him.

“Dean, listen. We don’t have to talk about this. I didn’t mean to—”

“I’m always hijacking people’s lives,” Dean says, moving his arm aside so he’s staring at the ceiling. “It’s, like, something I’ve resolved not to do anymore. Now that I’m on the other side. If we can still call this thing ‘life,’ then I’m doing this one differently.”

He can feel Cas’s gaze, even though he doesn’t return it.

“I can’t be alone. I suck at it. That’s the opposite of selfless, Cas. What you see as me caring for other people is actually me being terrified to be alone. Like, crippled by the thought of it. And I’d do _anything_ to keep people with me. I totally wrecked Sammy’s life with all that. Hell, dude tried to get away several times, and I always guilted him into coming back.” He pauses. “And sometimes I was just downright shitty about it. You should’ve heard the things I said to him when I got outta purgatory.”

“Dean, that’s all past now.”

“Except not really. Seriously, Cas. I thought heaven would be, you know, different. Like, nonstop fun and joy and leaving all your baggage behind. Then again, it’s probably that way for everyone else.”

Cas chuckles. “Heaven’s not perfect, Dean. It never was, and it never will be. Because we’re not perfect. The main difference is that there isn’t suffering here the way there is on earth. But we’re still who we were. And being here? It’s … an adjustment. It takes people a while to settle in.” He props himself up to look at Dean. “There was a reason old heaven kept everyone trapped in their best memories. When you’re living in the past, you’re not growing or changing. And without Chuck around, it was the best way to keep souls content. Or … _subdued_ , I should say.”

“But now it’s a whole new ballgame, huh.”

“Would you want it any other way?”

“Not really. But I need you to tell me when I’m being a dickhead. I mean, more than usual.”

Cas laughs again. Dean loves hearing him laugh. He laughed so rarely on earth—but so easily in heaven. Then he just looks at Dean, his eyes warm, and Dean’s thoughts are nothing but fond. _I love you so much, Cas_.

“You’re not hijacking my life, Dean. And I know you have—” he gestures to the space between them— “attachment issues. Of _course_ you do. I don’t care. In the other world, we couldn’t promise each other forever. Here we can.”

Dean swallows, trying not to let on how much their “talk” is getting to him. Cas puts things so delicately. When he first arrived in heaven and found Cas, he didn’t want to let him out of his sight. He didn’t say anything to Cas about this particular predilection; Cas just knew. So he subtly made sure he was always visible to Dean, or present in some way. If he had to go into another room for something, he announced he was doing so. If they went among other people or angels, Cas’s hand was never far from his. Dean knew he was being obsessive, but Cas seemed unfazed.

It wasn’t just that Cas had died so many times. It’s that Dean feels he squandered all his chances when Cas _did_ come back. By the time he figured out how much he’d wasted, it was too late to put it right. In the winter after Cas died, Dean would walk the fields near the end of the day, as light drained from the sky. Sometimes he’d take Miracle, but usually he’d go alone. He’d sit on a stump next to a pond and focus on the skyline, pretending that Cas existed just on the other side of it, and if he waited long enough, Cas would break through it and approach, growing from a small dot at the edge of the field to a figure Dean could recognize. _One more chance_ , he’d think.

When he speaks again, his voice is a bit shaky. “But if you ever _did_ have to go somewhere—”

“Dean.”

“No, seriously. Say the world blew up. Or Crowley got all jiggity or whatever. And the angels needed you, and you had to go get your smite on. I know I couldn’t go with you, so … I’d be here when you got back.”

Cas’s eyes soften a bit more, if that’s possible. “I know you would.”

“I’d be like, waiting.” He smirks, which is good because it means his eyes aren’t prickling so much now. “I’d have dinner ready. Shit, I’d even weed the garden. And wear something pretty when you got back.”

Cas laughs once more. “I don’t think you have to worry about those things, Dean. Honestly. Chuck is human. Heaven and hell are at peace—we have Jack to thank for that. Rowena keeps demons on a short leash, and she’s extremely fond of Jack. And Jack is just, you know … _Jack_. So good. And good at what he does.”

Dean lets his smile fade. He loves Jack, and he hates himself for the things he said to him toward the end of his life.

He remembers that day on the street—the last time he saw Jack when he was still alive—and Jack said he wasn’t coming back to the bunker. _No, you have to come home with us_ , Dean thought. He had so much to make up for, so many things he needed to do for Jack. To set right. (His characteristic selfishness, he thinks. That need to keep people with him for _his sake_ , not theirs.)

But there’d be no do-overs. Jack was gone. And that was that.

“You think Jack’s okay?”

“Of course,” Cas says. “Why do you ask?”

Dean asks because he sees how Jack’s changed. Cas must see it too, but he’s not bothered. Jack is different now—still kind and patient but also worldly. And weary, somehow. Sad.

Dean doesn’t say any of that. Instead: “He’s got a big job. Lotta responsibility, being God.”

“He handles it.” Cas rolls toward Dean, pressing his body against him. “Like no one else I’ve ever seen. This is what he was bound for. He simply _is God_.” Then Cas is kissing him again, and Dean is kissing him back. And Cas grips him tight and climbs on top of him, and Dean loves that—really _enjoys_ being manhandled by Cas, far more than he’d ever let on. (Cas undoubtedly knows anyway.)

Underneath everything, though, Dean wonders if Cas is right, or if the way they see Jack will always differ on a core, fundamental level. Cas has never been human— _not really_ , not in the way Jack was human—when human is all that Dean was. So maybe they’ll always relate to Jack differently. Cas always understood that Jack was a cosmic being with a glorious destiny, while Dean never bought it. To Dean, Jack was a scared kid—until that one day when he wasn’t anymore, and Dean was forced to reevaluate everything he knew.

And also, Cas was a good father to Jack. He doesn’t have the kind of deep, gnawing regrets that Dean has. He was so excited to be a dad—and so sad that he’d missed Jack’s first months—when all Dean could do was balk and complain, even when it was clear that Jack was as good as Sam and Cas said he was.

Just as Dean squandered his chances with Cas, he squandered them with Jack too. He wishes he could make things up to Jack, could see that speck on the horizon. But such things are impossible in heaven. For as wonderful as it is, it’s not a world in which humans can consciously intervene.

That’s why it’s easier to say _I love you_ here. The stakes aren’t as high.

*

Sam is driving Dean to look at colleges in and around the Pacific Northwest—even though the kid says he’ll probably go to U-Dub if he gets in—when Dean asks an odd question.

It’s the summer before Dean’s senior year, and the “college road trip” is still a thing, even if everything else about applying to college makes Sam feel like he comes from an era of hoopskirts and buggies. He remembers walking his Stanford app down to the post office and not having enough stamps. Finally the postal worker felt bad for him, spared him thirty-five cents.

Dean has just turned seventeen.

They’ve already seen Whitman College, which Dean thinks is too remote, and they’re on their way to Lewis and Clark by way of Reed, which Dean will probably dismiss as too small and snooty. He wants to major in astronomy and environmental science, and he’s convinced that smaller colleges don’t have big-time science faculty. Sam tells him to keep an open mind, and Dean says, “How can we even afford a school like that anyway?” And Sam doesn’t say much about this, because Dean is right—they can’t afford private school tuition on his salary—but Dean also doesn’t know that Sam has money stashed in a few places. He just says, “I’m not planning on retiring any time soon.”

Dean still doesn’t know anything. It’s a topic that Sam and Eileen have wrangled about over the years, ever since they got back together. She’s been a wonderful stepmom to Dean. Sam’s life is good. The best it’s ever been. He’d even say he’s happy.

But one thing he and Eileen don’t quite see eye-to-eye on is how much to tell Dean. About who they really are. About everything.

Sam wants to keep the kid’s life as normal as possible—the kind of life he didn’t have, the kind of life where monsters were pure fiction. And because the world is relatively safe now, there’s no real reason for Dean to have to be educated in the “family business.”

Sam and Eileen don’t hunt anymore, at all. When they first got together, they would take occasional assignments on the side, and, if Dean wasn’t with his mother that weekend, they’d tell him they were going out of town for a conference. Then they’d go dispatch a vamp nest together, or try to resolve a haunting. When they got back, they’d be careful to stash their equipment in a safe they kept in the basement.

As the years passed, though, the monsters grew fewer and farther between. Younger hunters took the cases. Once in a while they saw someone from the past, or had someone over if they were passing through—Claire, Kaia, Donna—but for the most part, hunting became the backdrop of their current-day lives, with their normal jobs and normal pursuits.

Jack gave that to them, Sam knows. The gift of normalcy. The gift of just being a person in the world—getting to come home from work, drink a beer, and watch the nightly news as you paid the bills. 

Still, Eileen wants Sam to open up more about the past. “Dean deserves to know more about your brother,” Eileen said to Sam one time. “He’s named after him, and I can tell he’s curious, the way he asks you about him, and the way he reacts when you react. He knows you’re sad, and it stops him from asking more. Believe me, Sam. I’m a poker player’s worst nightmare.”

About this, she was right. He could never lie to Eileen—not even if he wanted to.

“Your brother was such a huge part of your life, and Dean senses this. He should know more about him than the fact that he died in a hunting accident. That he wasn’t out hunting deer.”

“Someday,” Sam said. All these years later, Dean’s death is still raw. It’s been almost twenty years, but Sam’s still in that blasted barn. Wishing he’d done more for his brother in so many goddamn ways.

“At least put up a picture of him. What about that picture of you guys you’ve got in the safe? From when you were kids? Why don’t you let me frame it for you.”

Sam relented. Then, one day, he came home to discover that Eileen had done more than just hang that picture—she’d framed and hung a bunch of others, too. Of his mother, his father, and Dean. Even one with Dean and Cas.

“Sorry,” she said, in a way that told him she was not terribly sorry. “I went a little overboard.”

In truth, though, he liked the pictures. And looking at them reminded him of things—that his Dean had looked a lot like Original Dean when he was little. But now, not so much. If anything, he started to look more like Sam. A lot of people remark on the resemblance, not knowing Dean’s adopted. 

Dean rarely makes any mention of his biological parents, which surprises Sam. Sam has long waited for the day when he asks about his birth mother. He has the paperwork in the safe, set aside for the moment Dean asks to see it.

But Dean’s never asked.

Now he and Dean are driving down I-84 when Dean asks that weird question—which really isn’t so weird: his son is going to college next year, so he’s feeling nostalgic. (He’s had the kind of childhood he can feel nostalgic about. Sam’s proud of that.)

He says, “Hey Dad. Remember when I was really little, and you’d be trying to get me to fall asleep? And you’d tell me these stories. You’d tell me another part every night. And then it would be like ‘to be continued.’ And you’d come back the next night and tell me the next part.”

“Yeah, I remember that,” Sam says. His son had enjoyed a good story as much as the next kid, but Grimms’ just didn’t do it for him. So he started telling stories on the spot.

“And they were about this boy who was half-angel, half-human, and all the stuff he’d get up to.”

“You remember that?” Sam says, not taking his eyes off the road. He’s trying not to feel too suspicious. Dean couldn’t have been more than four or five when he told him those stories.

“Sure. Well, I probably wouldn’t have, if you hadn’t told me one that time I was in the hospital. Remember?”

How could he forget? Dean had a minor concussion, and that meant he wasn’t supposed to read—which didn’t really matter anyway, because they didn’t have any books with them—and he wasn’t supposed to watch TV, either. Once he was awake, he wanted to go home but couldn’t, and Sam couldn’t get him to go back to sleep. He was scared and a little disoriented and didn’t quite know what was going on.

To calm him down, Sam told him an angel-boy story.

“I remember,” Sam says. “What about it?”

“I was just thinking … what if you wrote those stories down? They were pretty good, Dad. You could probably get an illustrator and turn it into a series and make a ton of money. I mean, Janet’s mom rewrote ‘Rockabye Baby’? Where the baby _doesn’t_ fall out of the tree because she thought it was too traumatizing for little kids or something … and somehow _she_ sold it and got a big advance, and I’m thinking, hey, my dad’s stories about angel-boy were _fucking awesome_ , so much better than a retcon of ‘Rockabye Baby,’ so why doesn’t he sell those?”

Sam doesn’t chide Dean for his language. He’s too distracted.

“I mean, I just remember them, you know? Like, how the angel-boy’s powers meant that he grew up super-fast, and he could fly and had wings, but he could hide them most of the time and look totally human … and he lived in this secret bunker underground where he learned to fit into the normal human world? But he still had all these, you know, powers that were hard to control, so they got him in trouble.” Dean pauses and glances at Sam. “It was pretty creative, Dad.”

Because it actually _wasn’t_ creative, Sam thinks. Most of the stories were true. Or sort of true. Sam took a few liberties, obviously. He talked about who Jack was and what he did—and then he tacked on happy endings. Instead of a dead security guard, there was a stunned security guard whom the angel-boy healed—and from that day forward, he learned how to control his powers. Or there was the trip the angel-boy took up to heaven to see his mother, and she told him she was so proud of him and knew he’d do great things. But there was no mention of the Empty. Or, if there was (and Sam honestly can’t remember now), the Empty was nothing the angel-boy couldn’t easily outrun or defeat or put in a box.

The angel-boy would _always_ triumph in the end. If he died, he came back to life (no strings attached). If he got sent to a land of monsters, then he defeated all the monsters and saved his friends.

Each story ended with him hanging out and eating candy with his eccentric but very-appreciative friends: a 300-year-old red-haired benevolent witch who could do anything with the right ingredients, two monster-fighting brothers who _always_ got along, and their sidekick pal—an angel who occasionally said funny things because he was very old—much older than the witch—and didn’t understand how jokes worked.

Sam knows why he really told those stories—not for Dean as much, but for him. It was a way to keep Jack and Original Dean and Cas with him. As he told stories, he felt they were watching over him, proud of the way he was trying to be a dad.

Now he wonders: was he pulling a Chuck? Was it wrong to have told those stories? Their lives weren’t stories—they were their lives. And Jack’s life story had been far more complicated. But Sam had taken it and sprinkled on some sugar, and made it a bedtime yarn.

“I don’t really— _you’re_ the one who should write them, Dean. I’m too old. I don’t even remember.”

“I’m not much of a writer,” Dean says, looking out the window. “I’m not good at things like that.”

His mood seems to shift.

“Sure you are.”

“Not like you, Dad. I’m not, you know, smart. Like _that_.” He scoffs a bit, but his voice is shaky. Underneath his words there’s pain. “Let’s be real. I’ll be super lucky if I get into U-Dub. I’m just not … smart. Or special. I—” He glances over at Sam, and his voice softens. “I don’t mean to sound ungrateful. It’s nice that you’re taking me on this trip, to look at colleges and stuff. Even if it’s maybe a waste of time.” He looks out the window again.

Sam’s a little taken aback. He didn’t know Dean thought that way about himself.

He _does_ get good grades. Sure, he’s not at the tip-top of his class, but he’s articulate and diligent. A decent student. He’s been in serious trouble only once—when, after getting his learner’s permit, he and a friend took the keys to the Impala to go out joyriding. Except that the Impala was fucking ancient and hadn’t been serviced since Sam drove it to Washington and stuck it in the garage, all those years ago.

The Impala made it maybe a mile and a half before it broke down in an intersection. And then a cop showed up. And Sam got a phone call.

Other than that, Dean’s a good kid. He even learned sign language so he could better communicate with Eileen, picking it up much more easily than Sam did. When he got to high school, he petitioned to have the school count ASL toward his language requirement. When they wouldn’t, he was angry—not because he wanted out of his foreign language requirement, Sam realized, but because he felt the school was being discriminatory. “It’s like they’re saying ASL isn’t a real language,” he confessed hotly to Sam when Eileen wasn’t around.

And that’s the other thing: Dean’s sensitive. He knew Eileen might be hurt to find out that his school didn’t consider ASL a “real language,” so he didn’t tell her. (When Sam told Eileen about it, she wasn’t hurt or surprised. She’d been dealing with that kind of thing her whole life—but she was touched that Dean was so riled on her behalf.)

Dean is a good person—he’ll grow up to be a great adult—but Sam doesn’t know how to impress that upon him right now. He remembers what it was to be seventeen—to measure your value according to what others thought of you. Your looks. Your brains. Your athleticism. Compliments like “nice person” and “kind” and “genuine” were dull. Damning, almost.

“You _are_ smart,” Sam says. “You are. No, I’m not taking you on this trip just to be nice. Trust me, there are other things we could be doing if I thought this trip was a waste of time.”

Dean keeps looking out the window. “I’m not talking about smart. I’m talking about _smart_ -smart. And I’m not that. I’m average, Dad. I’m not like you. I’m not like, _Stanford_ smart.”

Oh. So that’s the sticking point.

Growing up in the Pacific Northwest is different from growing up in the Midwest. Here, Stanford is the only school that matters, unless you’re someone who wants to go “back east”—and who wants to deal with that weather? Stanford’s a golden ticket, an imprimatur that will set you up for the rest of your life.

And kids at Dean’s high school are ruthlessly competitive.

Where Sam grew up, few people had even heard of Stanford. If they had, it was because the president’s daughter was going there. _Why do you want to go to school so far away? What’s wrong with KU?_

“I didn’t graduate from Stanford,” Sam says. “So no, it doesn’t count. I was a college dropout, Dean. That’s not something to be proud of.”

“But you _got in_. With _a scholarship_. Last year, Michelle O’Hanlon got waitlisted, and she had the highest grades in the class and a perfect score on the SAT. _And_ she plays in a regional orchestra and got second in that math competition. And even she couldn’t get in.”

“It wasn’t as competitive back then, Dean. Trust me, I didn’t get a perfect score on my SAT, and I didn’t play in an orchestra. I was just a kid from a working-class family that moved around a lot. And that made for a good essay.”

He’s being partly truthful. He _did_ indeed have high scores. And excellent grades. But he doubts Stanford would have plucked him out of an upscale suburban high school. His working-class roots and heart-rending essay made him just sympathetic—and exotic—enough for some admissions staffer to take pity.

“And like I said, I dropped out. So, lousy investment on their part.”

Dean turns to look at him. “But you had to drop out for like, family reasons. It’s not like they _kicked_ you out.”

The story as Dean knows it is that his family fell behind in their finances and his father disappeared suddenly, and his brother needed him to come home to help with the family business, which was key-making. They were locksmiths in their last decade of glory before key fobs won the day.

“I still think it’s insane that Grandpa didn’t make you go back to college once he got home,” Dean says.

“He wasn’t thrilled that I went in the first place. Where I grew up … well, it was considered more important to help your family than to get a fancy degree.”

“Didn’t they understand that you’d be able to help a lot more _with_ a fancy degree?”

“They didn’t think about it that way, Dean. And … my father wasn’t a well man.”

This is how Sam usually ends these conversations. _My father wasn’t well. He had PTSD and depression. Some alcoholism. And no coping skills._ End of.

But this time Sam decides to take a different route. “Also … I honestly liked helping my brother with the family business. It was stressful sometimes, but we got along. I’m glad we had that time together, looking back on it now.”

“Because he died so young?”

“That’s part of it. But Dean—my brother Dean—he really didn’t have much of a childhood. He worked to take care of me, so for him college was never an option. But he never complained about that. He was one of these people that … you know, you don’t see people like this these days, and you didn’t in my day either, but the sort of person who goes off to war without thinking of themselves. Or the sort of person who raises all eight of their siblings because their parents died, and never complains about it, or expects to have their own life. That was my brother. It was never about him. It was about everyone else.”

Sam grips the steering wheel, realizing he hasn’t talked so much about Dean in years. Maybe that’s why he feels both excited and depleted. Wanting to say more while simultaneously saying nothing. Wanting to share while also keeping his memories to himself.

“And, um, you remind me of him,” Sam finally says, once he’s caught his breath. “You’re kind and you’re giving. You’re a good person, Dean, and I’m very proud of you.”

Dean doesn’t say anything for a while. Then he finally says: “I’m not like that. Not _that_ kind of person.”

“Because you don’t have to be. Because our lives aren’t like that. But if they were, you would be. And you _are smart_. Not many people get grades like you do. Or want to major in environmental science.”

“ _Of course_ I want to major in environmental science, Dad. I mean, holy shit. Have you seen pictures of glaciers lately?”

“See, there you go,” Sam says, feeling like he’s about to pull a smile out of his son after all. “Not a lot of people feel that way. Not everyone picks their major based on what’ll help people. Or the environment.”

“But you did.”

“Not when I was your age. I wanted to become a lawyer and make obscene amounts of money.”

There’s a silence between them, but not one that feels uncomfortable. Then Dean finally says, “Are there other ways I’m like him?”

“He also liked old music from before his time. Like you. Not quite the same genre, though.” His Dean likes hip hop from the ‘90s and 2000s. It’s like he’s working his way through the decades, and right now he’s stuck on the Summer of Crunk. (Sam hopes this phase passes quickly. He wasn’t a huge Lil John fan the first time around.)

“My brother’s tastes were more like … Credence Clearwater Revival. Lynyrd Skynyrd. Led Zeppelin.”

“I’ve never heard of any of those people,” Dean says.

“Really? Not even Led Zeppelin?”

Dean shakes his head.

Sam laughs. Original Dean would be so horrified. “My brother would say I have totally failed you.”

That evening they get into town, grab a bite to eat, and then find the hotel. As usual, Sam tells Dean to stay in the car while he goes inside to “make sure everything looks okay.” He tells Dean he’s looking for signs of bedbugs and other issues, but what he’s really doing is checking the room for hex-bags and putting up some inconspicuous warding—usually behind a painting or inside a closet, where no one will see it. He knows he’s a little paranoid (he hasn’t had any issues in years) but better safe than sorry.

When he goes back out to the car, Dean just looks at him. “Nothing defective?” he asks. “No bedbugs?” His tone is a little put-on, as though he senses the pretense of the entire thing. Or is just bored with it.

Sam decides to blow past it. “Nothing I could see. I ever tell you the time I picked them up in Spokane?”

“Yes,” Dean says tiredly.

“There’s no getting rid of those things.”

That night, he pulls back the covers to get in bed, trying to forget the number of times he and Original Dean did this over the years, but always in some sketchy “pay by the hour” dump where bedbugs were the least of their worries. And then how, in later years, Cas would come along on cases and look at the internet while they slept, which annoyed Dean to no end. He’d make noises about how Cas should book his own room or go find a prostitute or something … but it was clear that Cas never took him seriously. And Dean never forced the issue. “Must be fantastic, never having to sleep,” Dean said once to Sam.

Sam felt the opposite. He would have hated a life where he had to be awake all twenty-four hours with his thoughts and his feelings and his fears.

Sleep was life’s greatest gift.

Now Dean is sitting in his bed with his tablet, playing some kind of game. Sam just decides to ask: “What was it about? The story in the hospital. The angel-kid.”

Dean looks up from the game. “Oh. Can’t remember that well, but I think it had something to do with lying.”

“Lying? Really.” What souped-up story could he have possibly told about Jack and lying? There were a few possibilities, and none of them seemed suitable for a bedtime story.

Dean sets the tablet aside and looks at Sam. “It was like … the angel-boy’s friends played a trick on him or something. They told him there was a magic pebble at the bottom of a well, and he had to fly down and find it. But they were lying. When he came back up, all wet and muddy, they were laughing at him, and he got so pissed off he told them to stop lying. Apparently, though, when he told them to stop lying, he accidentally made it so no one in the entire world could lie. So no one could lie, which seemed good at first? Like, people who committed crimes confessed them and went to prison. But then it but sorta got out of control, with people walking up to their friends and telling them every little thing that they hated about them, or telling their boss ‘no’ if he asked them to do something. So the angel-boy’s friends found him and apologized and asked him to put the world back the way it was before. And he said he would, just as long as they were honest with him and never lied to him again.”

Sam looks at the TV, which is showing a basketball game. “You think I should actually write that down? And that people would buy it?”

Dean shrugs. “Maybe I’m not remembering it well enough. I mean, obviously there was a lot more to it than that. I sorta remember the moral was like, sometimes you just have to lie.”

Sam laughs. “Geez, what a great moral for a kids’ book.”

“I’m not explaining it right.” He looks frustrated—annoyed, maybe, that his dad is so dismissive. Perhaps he feels like his memories are at stake here.

He turns to get under the covers. “It was more like … you should be honest. And obviously you shouldn’t be a dick to people, by playing some stupid joke. But sometimes, once in a while, it’s more important to be kind than to be honest. And to keep your private thoughts to yourself if it’s going to hurt someone’s feelings.” He shrugs. “That’s what I took from it. It _really_ wasn’t that complicated.” He turns out the light next to his bed and rolls over. “Goodnight, Dad,” he says, and Sam can’t decide if his son is annoyed with him, or just tired.

*

They return home, and a few weeks later Dean begins his senior year. But the college tour stays with Sam like a persistent cough. Dean seems to grow more distant, and Sam wonders if it’s just senior year stuff. Probably.

Still, Sam can’t help but speculate if Dean was laying out a trail of breadcrumbs, if there was some greater meaning in his bringing up the story about the angel-boy. He imagines what would happen right now if Jack told the entire world to stop lying. He’d have a lot of explaining to do.

“You should really talk to talk to Dean,” Eileen says one evening when they’re loading the dishwasher after dinner. Dean still at school with the drama club, helping to tear down a set. 

Her voice is plain and urgent.

“He’s not going to be here very much longer, Sam. And … he asked me something.”

Sam looks up. “What?”

“I noticed he was looking at the pictures of your family. Really _looking_. On more than one occasion. He looked like he wanted to ask me something, but I didn’t, so I asked him if anything was wrong.”

Sam studies her as she reaches down to put a large mixing bowl in the bottom rack.

“At first he said nothing was wrong. Then he turned to me and said that he swore you once told him a long time ago that your mother had died when you were a baby. But that he must have been wrong about that, since you later talked about her a lot, and there are pictures, obviously. He was wondering how he could have misremembered something like that.”

“What did you say?”

“I told him I didn’t know and that he should ask you about it. And then he said something, like, ‘oh, well maybe he meant that his mother was just missing for a lot of his childhood, and they assumed she was dead. I know Dad had a weird childhood.’ It’s like he was trying to rationalize.”

Sam sighs, looking out the window into the backyard. It gets dark early now at this time of the year, but he can still see the trees bobbing in the wind.

“I don’t know how much he suspects,” Eileen continues. “I couldn’t tell if he was troubled because he thought he’d misremembered something, or because he thinks he’s being lied to.”

Sam turns away from the window and leans with his back against the counter, his arms crossed against his chest.

“It’s not my place to say, but maybe it’s time to level with him. It’s clear to me he’s been having these thoughts for a while.”

Sam knows she’s right—it’s probably time. But he truly wanted to give Dean the childhood he never had. “I just wanted him to have his senior year.”

“What are you afraid of?”

Sam shakes his head—not at her but at himself, and at the situation in general.

“I’m proud of you,” she says. “Of the work you did. _We_ did. We have nothing to be ashamed of. We’re not in the witness protection program, but I wouldn’t be surprised if Dean suspects so.”

What _is_ he really afraid of? That Dean couldn’t handle the new information? No, it’s something beyond that. It’s the fear that Dean’s entire world will be upended, that he’ll look back and reevaluate everything he thought he knew. Sam never had to go through that. His life and his reality were one and the same. His mother had been killed by a demon; his father hunted that demon. For as difficult as his life was, no one kept anything from him.

But worse, maybe, is the idea that Dean would understand the reason for all the secrets and lies. That he’d change. That he’d feel responsible for the world in the way his brother once did.

It’s a strange thought, and one he’s not comfortable with. It’s not wrong if his son wants to devote his life to helping others, and it should be his choice. But he thinks of all the things his brother sacrificed, and it terrifies him. It terrifies him that his son might feel obligated in the same way, that his Dean will become both a stranger and an uncanny familiar—a reflection of all that Sam wanted to escape, and an indictment of his desire to do so.

*

At the end of the winter, Dean gets into University of Washington, no waitlist or branch campus. Seattle campus, fall quarter, college of arts and sciences. Huge sigh of relief.

They celebrate by carrying in from a nice restaurant and opening a bottle of red wine.

Afterwards, Sam slips away to the basement to get something from the safe.

Inside is a scaled-down version of the first half of his adult life. A few pictures of his family—mostly of Dean—that Eileen didn’t frame. Books he kept after leaving the bunker. Silver bullets and the guns that can shoot them. Some ingredients for spells he got from Rowena. His father’s journal.

He takes what he needs, closes the safe, and goes to find Dean.

Kid’s in his bedroom, sitting on the bed, listening to headphones as he looks at his laptop. At first, he doesn’t know Sam is there. Then he looks up. Slips off the headphones.

“Hey,” Sam says.

“Hey.”

Sam looks at the envelope he’s holding. “I just—Dean, I want you to have this.”

Dean looks at the envelope, and then he looks up at Sam.

“Adoption papers, and other things. If you want to look for your birth mom, it’s all right here.”

Dean looks back at his laptop, and now he looks angry. Disgusted almost. “I don’t want them.”

“We always said when you were eighteen—”

“I’m not eighteen! Not for another five months.”

Sam slowly lowers his hand so that the envelope is against his thigh. “Dean—”

“No, Dad, I’m tired of it.” He looks up, and then goes back to his laptop. “I don’t know how many times I’ve told you this, but _you’re_ my father. And Mom’s my mother. And then I have Eileen and Rodney. I already have more parents than most. How else can I say it?”

Sam lets out a deep breath he’s been holding. “Dean, I know you feel this way now. But in the future … it would be perfectly understandable if you want to know. You don’t have to look at them now—”

Dean slams his laptop shut. “Just stop talking.” His voice is muted and strangely hoarse. “I know who I am and I _don’t care_ about any of that.”

 _I know who I am_. The sentiment lingers.

Sam feels terrible. He understands that, for Dean, this won’t be the day he got into college. It’ll be this confrontation with his father. The day his father revealed he felt he wasn’t enough to make Dean happy.

“Dean, I’m sorry,” he begins, but as he begins, he’s slowly backing out of Dean’s room, and Dean is standing from the bed, his eyes filling with tears.

Then he relents all of a sudden, his voice going soft. “It’s fine, Dad. Just—just leave it there.”

Sam does so before going to find Eileen. He needs to confess what he’s done.

Weeks later, when Dean is away spending time with his mother, Sam lingers in front of Dean’s bedroom. The envelope lies on the desk as he left it, never opened at all.

*

There are all kinds of endings.

It’s the end of another day—or what counts as a day in heaven—when Gabriel stops by Jack’s office.

Usually he says, “How’s omniscience treating you?”

But not today. Today he just says, “Office hours still on?” His voice projects bravado to hide how tentative he is, how much he’s dreading this conversation. Jack knows why.

Gabriel has fallen in love with someone else. Anna. They work together, so in some ways this was inevitable, and Jack would be lying if he said he didn’t know how things would go from the very first day.

He just refused to look at it.

He knows he has no real reason to be upset. He and Gabriel slept together just the once; they weren’t an actual couple. Now he realizes he should have asked why. He would have been happy to take things further, but it never happened, and both of them seemed fine to leave it where it was.

They should have spoken about it. Clarified things. Gabriel’s the closest thing he has to a best friend. If anything, Jack feels more hurt that Gabriel didn’t feel he could confide in him about how he was feeling. But Jack also understands—and this is the thing that stings—that maybe Gabriel never saw their friendship that way at all. Or maybe he felt what they did was wrong, or too compromising.

So Jack isn’t upset for his own sake. Really. He wasn’t upset when he found out—when, while scanning heaven for Gabriel one day, he saw them together. Nothing serious—just together—but he understood. Then he scolded himself for looking in on them in the first place. He tries not to use his powers that way, but he had something to tell Gabriel and assumed he’d be alone.

Now Gabriel has come to tell him.

He moves with an awkward and palpable sense of dread, coming into the office and closing the door behind him, treading lightly, and Jack can tell he knows that Jack knows. Maybe that’s why he decided to end things this way. Easier to ask forgiveness, et cetera. To have gone to Jack beforehand—to tell him he’d moved on—would have required a sense of integrity that Gabriel doesn’t believe he has.

And it’s precisely because Gabriel is being very Gabriel that Jack doesn’t tell Gabriel what he already knows, or make any effort to coax things out of him. They’d both prefer it if he did—to put the conversation out of its misery, if nothing else. But Jack waits anyway, allowing Gabriel to unspool his narrative. Once he’s explained things, Jack gives in.

“You don’t—you don’t have to apologize,” he says.

For a moment Gabriel looks relieved. Then he looks wounded. He quickly recomposes himself. “I do, though.”

“You really don’t. We weren’t—” he gestures to the space between them. “You don’t owe me anything, Gabriel. You don’t need my forgiveness—there’s nothing to forgive. We’re still friends. I love you. I told that nothing would ever change that, that I would always love you and be here for you in whatever way I can, for as long as I can.”

Gabriel looks up at the ceiling and takes a deep breath. “I did owe you better, though. I did.”

Jack just moves forward and embraces him. It’s impossible to be angry with someone like this, this tangled-up creature who cries into Jack’s shoulder and thinks, _I am the sort of person who always ruins everything_.

*

Another reason it’s impossible to be angry with him: he really loves Anna. What he feels for her isn’t something stupid or small. It wasn’t an indiscretion. It was about the fact that they’ve shared things. Feelings. Experiences.

They’ve also put things off for a long time. A few eons, maybe. Angel bullshit always got in the way. And, well, Jack can’t blame them for finally admitting they want more.

*

He rarely allows himself this kind of indulgence: he goes to see the house where he was born. It’s still abandoned. Maybe it’s abandoned because he wants it that way. Or maybe it’s abandoned because it’s an old drafty house at the edge of a cove where the land is crumbling into the water. He has to wonder why Cas and Kelly picked a place like this—at the edge of the world, where everything washes away.

His mother is the closest thing he has to a home, and maybe one of the few people who actually sees him for who he is, but he doesn’t want to go to her now. As strange as it sounds, he regards her attention as a luxury. It would feel wasteful, almost, to go talk to her about a breakup.

And why does he want to talk to anyone _at all?_ He doesn’t know why he feels this bizarre impulse to divulge. He keeps everything else to himself—why is this different? He feels like he could walk into town and pour his heart out to a stranger: _I don’t fit anywhere._

He misses Sam.

When he’s still, and when he concentrates, he can look in on Sam and see everything he was, and everything he’ll be. He can see how the relationship with his son will become more tense in the near future, but only briefly, and then they’ll be close once more. He can see how Sam will lose Eileen—suddenly. Too suddenly. He’ll curse Jack about it— _how could you do this to me again?_ —and Jack won’t have an answer because there is no answer, and because he’d keep Eileen on earth if he could. But by the time Sam forgives Jack, Eileen’s already making plans, telling Dean all her stories, and they laugh together and look forward to Sam joining them and think of practical jokes to play on him when he arrives.

He can see the cancer Sam will beat and the cancer he won’t, and the friends he’ll have with him in the end, and the way he’ll finally let his son in. He’ll tell him a little at first. And then a lot. And then, one day, he’ll even tell him about Jack. Jack, who never got to be a baby, never got to be a kid, and was a young adult only briefly before he left, and if Sam had known it was going to unfold that fast, he’d have done things differently. Or—at least he once thought so. But even for this Sam is eventually able to forgive himself.

Jack doesn’t let himself see beyond that, not Sam’s death, not their eventual reunion. He needs those moments to remain untouched.

*

Cas’s garden is a good place to just think.

He doesn’t go to see Cas—he knows Cas isn’t there. Maybe he will tell Cas, but not today.

From Cas’s garden he can see the Roadhouse. It’s funny—its proximity to Dean and Cas’s place changes daily. Just like time, space is relative in heaven, and highly variable, and people can put things where they want. So the distance between the Roadhouse and Dean’s home has become shorthand for how Dean is feeling. Each morning he tells Cas if it’s a twelve-mile kinda day, or a twelve-yard kinda day. A twelve-mile day doesn’t mean he’s pissed or grumpy (though he could be)—but when the Roadhouse is closer, it means that Dean is feeling sociable.

Leaning against a tree with his arms crossed, Jack can see the Roadhouse in the distance, all lit up against a late-summer dusk sky. A lot of people they knew—Winchester and Winchester-adjacent—are there right now. But there are also new faces. People passing through on their way to their own corner of heaven who decide to stop in. Sometimes even angels stop by—those who are curious about such places.

Dean is not at the Roadhouse right now but in his house, and when he comes outside he’ll see that Jack is there. So Jack has to decide whether to leave before Dean finds him.

He decides to stay.

Sure enough, the door opens and closes a few moments later. Jack feels Dean linger for a moment, so he turns his head to look at Dean, just to let him know it’s him.

“Hello,” he says to Dean.

“Hey Jack.” Dean regards him curiously. “You looking for Cas? He’ll be here soon.”

“Thanks, Dean.” Jack turns around. “But I was just passing through.” He smiles at Dean and sticks his hands in his pockets and tries to shrug. He walks toward Dean on his way to the mouth of the garden.

Dean looks bemused. “You wanna talk about it?”

Jack tries to shrug again as he approaches Dean.

“Come on,” Dean says. “You didn’t come here to just stand around. At least come inside. Cas would love to see you.” His smile fades as Jack draws closer. “I would too, kid. I know you’re busy, but … I miss you.” He reaches out and touches Jack’s forearm.

He looks up. Dean’s eyes meet his. The sheer pathos of the gesture makes Jack’s eyes fill.

“Oh kid,” Dean says, pulling him close, enfolding him in a hug much warmer and longer than any they shared on earth. Dean’s not a hugger, but when Jack sniffles he just pulls him closer. “First breakup’s always the worst. Until the next one happens. Then _that’s_ the worst.”

Jack pulls away and just looks at Dean. _How does he know?_

“Oh, come on,” Dean says. “First time a woman dumped me, I couldn’t even eat. So … come inside and tell me about her. Or … yeah.”

Jack already knows that he’ll go inside with Dean—not to talk about it (he won’t say much), but because his doing so means so much to Dean. And him, too. To both of them. He turns and follows Dean into the house.


End file.
